End Of The Century

The process of re-reading can be a strange one, I think. Personally I have never been one for doing much of it. There is always something ‘new’ to move onto, after all, and a book requires so much more time and attention than a record, say, or even a film. Both of those media reward our focus of course, but they seldom require immediate investment of more than a couple of hours at a time. Indeed the best long-player records can be over in a half hour. A film, an hour on top of that. A book though? A detective novel? Four of five hours maybe, and that spread over the space of days, weeks, depending on circumstances. I know some people take months to finish a book and that is fine because everyone’s lives and demands are different, but I struggle to remember what’s going on beyond three or four days. Occasionally I’ll manage a book in a single sitting but that is much rarer than it used to be and is surely as reliable a measurement of age as anything else.

I know too that many people have books they return to on a fairly regular basis. They are something of a comfort blanket perhaps. Familiarity with the magic of their prose, or with the resolution of their narratives lends a certain solace maybe. It never ceases to amaze me the number of times people can read Jane Austen, for example. I have tried reading her books and been defeated each time. I think the reasons are to do with the structure of the writing, but I am not intellectually informed enough on those things to be certain. Maybe one day it will click and make sense in much the same way Bruce Springsteen’s records did, though I admit my saying this is largely an excuse to put Springsteen and Austen in the same sentence.

Forcing myself to re-read books for this project then has been interesting. Mostly I realise how little I remember.

I do know however that it was 2003 when I was feverishly picking up and reading as much by Ross Macdonald as I possibly could because an old train ticket fell out of a copy of ‘Black Money’. It is one of those great Black Lizard ‘crime classics’ paperback editions with very period 1990s graphic design. The pages are now yellowed but it looks terrific in a photograph with a morning coffee, which is one of my ongoing projects, or habits or whatever. The photographs I mean, not the coffee, although of course it is both.

I’ll get back to Ross Macdonald eventually, I promise, but for now let me go off an on tangent and say that the photographs of beverages and books started in 2015 and that the first picture I made was of Joseph Hansen’s great ‘Fadeout’ alongside a coffee in a mug from The Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. Hansen’s short series of novels featuring his detective Dave Brandstetter are well worth seeking out. He’s celebrated mostly these days as being the first openly gay detective character, and that is to be applauded of course. There is certainly a degree of Hansen reclaiming the whole queer identity and reframing the language in positive ways within the books, but they are also just really well crafted detective stories that maybe help shine a light on the strange strained suffusion of homoerotic sexual tensions that exist in much of the hard boiled stuff. All those manly figures showing off their toughness to each other. Psychiatrists would have a field day.

Another of my early beverage and book photographs was made in the Boston Tea Party cafe in Exeter. I recognise the table grain and one of their big white mugs holding a black coffee. The book is Don Carpenter’s ‘Hard Rain Falling’, one of those really nice New York Review Of Books paperbacks with a terrific cover photograph by Ken Light. It’s not a detective novel, but it is a story of crime and punishment and redemption of sorts. Carpenter is Dostoyevsky if he’d been around in the Beat Generation. His fans include Jonathan Lethem, Anne Lamont and Richard Price, who all supply effusive copy for the back cover. There’s an introduction too by George Pelecanos, which is naturally worth reading.

Pelecanos should be given a lot of credit here because, when I think about it, he was maybe my line (back) into detective fiction when the Serpent’s Tail imprint published his trilogy of Nick Stefanos mysteries in 1998. That late 1990s period was a pretty hectic time for me. I’d been teaching art in a Devon high school for six years by 1998 but still somehow found the time to be writing pretty much non stop about music and books. By 1998 too the Tangents.co.uk website would have been running for a couple of years, growing as it did out of a decade or more of fanzine writing and publishing. I’m fairly certain I had blagged review copies of other books from Serpent’s Tail and that they sent me the Pelecanos trilogy as part of their regular publicity mail out. I’m glad they did because really those books hit me like a freight train. Something about elements coming together serendipitously at the same time, maybe, but Pelecanos seemed like a voice that connected. The intensity of his prose in those Stefanos books still prickles with the energy of the DC Hardcore punk bands he’d maybe have been seeing in his formative years. The Pop cultural references effortlessly root the stories to place and time but crucially never feel forced. That’s much more difficult than it sounds.

In his later books there is perhaps a sense of Pelecanos getting sidetracked by Issues based narrative arcs, but I would say his attempts to address more serious, grown up topics like political corruption never feel as lightly done as, say, Chandler managed. That can be taken as a criticism or as praise though, so take your pick. Throughout though Pelecanos has never lost his talent for capturing speech, being as skilled in that area as any of the tough school predecessors or indeed his contemporaries. He neatly continues the hard boiled predilection for detective characters who are tough yet sensitive, soft yet strong, maybe much like Pelecanos himself. That was certainly the feeling I got when I interviewed him at the tiny Nantos Hotel, a Greek place in London where he was doing some publicity back in 1998 to promote the his just published ‘The Sweet Forever’. At the time I was doing this thing on Tangents called ‘Mass Observation’ which was a bunch of questions split in two sections, one for the present day and one for when people were 16 years old. This conceit was all tied up in the notion that 16, or at least the conceptual age of 16 is when we are ‘born’, pop-culturally speaking. It’s a flawed conceit of course, but I mostly stand by it. Anyway, the opening questions went like this:
“Where are you?”
“Nantos hotel, London.”
“What are you?”
“A Greek American writer.”

And then the third question, which was intended as one about the creative output, and couched in British English colloquialism: “What do you make?”

“What do I MAKE?”. I thought Pelecanos was going to hit me. End of interview right there. Of course he naturally interpreted this from an American perspective and assumed I was being outrageously nosey about his income. “What do I MAKE?…” In the astonished pause, I quickly realised how he had taken the question and I just as quickly filled the pause with an explanation of the intention. Thankfully he laughed and went with it. “Books” was the blunt and pretty obvious answer, the unspoken part being, did I really have to ask?

Perhaps unsurprisingly that session with Pelecanos was the start and pretty much the end of my foray into the realm of the journalistic interview. Teaching increasingly took up my time, and that was a pretty tough job, even back at the end of the 20th Century. It’s much harder now, although that’s another story, the kind of story Pelecanos would probably tell really well. In fact he kind of did, though obviously from an American perspective, in season 4 of the TV show ‘The Wire’ in which the character of Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski takes on a job as a Math teacher in a Baltimore middle school. By season 4 Pelecanos had dialled back his involvement in the show to focus on a new book, but he still got some writing credits. I recall seeing Pelecanos’ name in the credits for the show when it screened in the UK and being so pleased because he had answered my Mass Observation question about what he wanted to be when he was 16 with “I wanted to make movies.” So ‘The Wire’ was not exactly a movie, but it was close. Maybe better.

So I think I’ve got a lot to be grateful to George Pelecanos for. He kind of scared the shit out of me, yes, but he hooked me (back) into the detective genre, so he is to thank for all of this. Or to blame. Take your pick.

Someone else who dug Pelecanos was James Sallis. His 2001 novel ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ is the sixth and final instalment of a tremendous series featuring detective Lew Griffin and at one point Griffin is to be found “reading a novel set in Washington by some guy with a Greek name”. Elsewhere in the book Sallis drops references to the Rebel Inc imprint which was so enormously important back at the turn of the 20th to 21st Centuries with its reprints of such essentials as John Fante, Jim Dodge’s ‘Stone Junction’, and Emmett Grogan’s mighty ‘Ringolevio’. Sallis describes it as ‘a new publishing house in Scotland run by a bunch of kids’. The story of Rebel Inc is fascinating in itself, with its roots in the world of fanzines and the strange literate punk energies of Edinburgh. There is a fun story of Alan Warner sending some poetry for potential inclusion in the ‘Rebel Inc’ magazine back in the 1990s, and signing it all as being by/from Morvern Callar (Warner was still writing the novel of the same name at the time). Publisher of the ‘Rebel Inc’ ‘zine Kevin Williamson however recognised the handwriting on the envelope as being Warner’s. He says that “Warner probably thinks I’ve forgotten but I don’t forget anything like that. I remember everything.”

Lew Griffin remembers everything too. He’s forever bringing up quotations and peppering them through his books. Lots of philosophy, Emerson in particular. And of course I say Lew Griffin when I really mean James Sallis. It’s James Sallis who manages to pull up all sorts of delightful philosophical gems and he just happens to use Lew Griffin to give them voice. Such is the life of the writer. Of course Lew Griffin himself is a writer too as well as a teacher, an investigator and a drunk. Not that Sallis is all of those things, or indeed any of those things except writer, although perhaps somewhere inside we are all of us all of those things at some point in our lives, to a greater or lesser degree, with more or less adherence to dictionary definitions. Anyway, to coin a phrase some of my Tangents writer friends and I used a lot, James Sallis writes like God.

But only sometimes. I once read his spy thriller ‘Death Will Have Your Eyes’, and it was not that great. But the Lew Griffin novels, now that’s another matter. Of course all the greatest Noir has always at core been about Identity, and this is probably why Sartre and Camus were such fans. Sallis understands this implicitly, and the Lew Griffin novels are notably as much about identity and spirit as they are about crime. Indeed, in ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ and to a lesser extent in ‘Bluebottle’, crime barely comes into it, the books being much more about the nature of exploration or, if you will, investigation; looking for clues as to who and why we are what we are as much as to solve any misdemeanour. Perhaps also the only misdemeanour is our very existence on this Earth, but maybe that’s getting altogether too maudlin and end-of-the-world weary.

Sallis writes as much as anything about the splendour of books, and the splendour of life and people. He writes about the search for meaning in words and in faces, gestures, touches, kisses, words shared, exchanges… all of this thrown up and examined and found both life-affirming and wanting at the same time. Of course all great Noir is essentially existential, and Sallis writes the poetry of the weary existential outsider with a sparkling mix of the coolest prose in the warmest of lonely hearts. His books still feel special.

Be Thankful For What You’ve Got

If Hollywood and Southern California in general could be thought of as important characters in the Three Investigators books (as, ahem, investigated last time out) then they are certainly key to the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ novels of Raymond Chandler. In many ways the landscapes are characters that people the texts just as much as series detective Philip Marlowe. Place informs person, person becomes place. Fact becomes fiction. Memory becomes twisted and the Time Machines of media seduce us into believing things that may not be true based on the available evidence.

Take ‘The Big Sleep’ for example. In my mind, Humphrey Bogart’s portrayal of Marlowe was certainly the first time I was exposed to Raymond Chandler, although it is difficult to prove this. The ‘genome’ Internet search facility of the BBC makes the nailing down of potential suspects easy, yet the results simply throw up more uncertainty. ‘The Big Sleep’ was screened on BBC2 at 11.35pm on a Saturday night in 1979, which would have made me 13 years old. Now as much as I would like to pretend (and in the past, certainly have) that I was a hipped-up and switched-on teenager, the truth is that it is highly unlikely I could ever have seen the film at this point. My protective parents simply would not have allowed me to still be out of bed at such a time, never mind be stuck in front of the television set. Another option then is two years later, when the film was again screened on BBC 2, this time as part of a season of Howard Hawks pictures. The start time of 8.15pm on a Thursday in July makes it more plausible until one takes into account the fact that at 9pm the sole television in our house would be religiously tuned to BBC1 for The Nine O’Clock News. One other fact that blows this possibility entirely out of the water is that ‘Butterflies’ was on at 8pm on BBC 1, and my mum would certainly have been settled in front of that. When, then, could I possibly have seen ‘The Big Sleep’? The next date of broadcast on the BBC is 1993, by which point I was living in Devon, struggling through a first year of teaching, and the memory that shimmers in my mind is certainly of having seen Bogart do his Marlowe thing when I was an impressionable teenager. It’s a conundrum.

This ad hoc investigation is interesting to me, I think, because it suggests that time is a slippery customer and memory of it an unreliable conduit. The ‘facts’ then are most likely that I have imagined this teenage viewing of ‘The Big Sleep’ as part of some elaborate construction of an alternative self, rooted in those youthful desires to be something we are not. It strikes me that this is an essential part of being young, although exactly where you draw the defining lines of ‘youth’ in terms of years is up for grabs.

Something I do remember with vividness though is when, in my first year of teaching, I rather foolishly volunteered to take a Year 11 assembly (bear with me on this). One of the reasons I did this, I believe, was to confront the terror I still felt at standing up in front of large(ish) audiences. A class of 30 I could just about handle, but the idea of some 270 fifteen and sixteen year olds would have been scarier than seeing The Green Ghost. So what did I talk to them about? Well, I started off by playing ‘Blank Generation’ by Richard Hell and The Voidoids, then wittering on about how the great uncertainties of our/their teenage years can be an opportunity to try on different personalities, to search uncomfortably but also uncompromisingly for who and what we want to be, rather than what our parents or teachers think we ought. I also read an extract from a Lester Bangs interview with Hell, which was something about the nature of being a teenager, about how they are the worst years of our lives full of zits and whatever, which raised a ripple of laughs. Anyway, when I’d stopped rambling and the bell for afternoon lessons rang, the hall rather unexpectedly erupted in applause. This was, I was reliably informed, unheard of. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it remains as one of the most pleasurable memories of some three decades of teaching.

I’m certain there were some kids in that assembly audience who forgot anything I’d said the moment I’d said it. Some too who would have thought me attention seeking, trying to look ‘cool’ or whatever. There may be more than a grain of truth in that. Some desperation to be seen to be something other than what I knew/know myself to be, which is something minor and largely forgettable. It is the same reason I am writing this some thirty three years later, no doubt. And that’s fine. The tension between reality and fantasy, dreaming and waking, fact and fiction is central to existence. Well, central to mine at least. I couldn’t shake it if I tried. And goodness knows I’ve tried.

We’re straying off the path here, aren’t we? Wasn’t this meant to be about Raymond Chandler? Or at least about when I could first have seen ‘The Big Sleep’? That’s the thing though, isn’t it? I have no idea when I could have first seen ‘The Big Sleep’ or ‘The Maltese Falcon’ or ‘Double Indemnity’ or ‘Murder My Sweet’ of any of those Noir films. The reality however is almost irrelevant next to the perception, which is rooted in an imaginary, constructed teenage period of indeterminate length. Something too, doubtless, about ‘The Big Sleep’ being tied up with the Scottish band Simple Minds, with whom I have had a complicated relationship through my life. Of course I say complicated but it is really quite simple. I loved them and then I hated them, before eventually maturing into a place where I could filter what I found uncomfortable and enjoy again what I once had found so mesmerising. Their song ‘Big Sleep’ is certainly one of those things I now, once more, find astonishingly beautiful. It is a song that pulsates and shimmers, full of the seductive sorrow of lost youth, lost love, lost memory, lost connection.

In many respects then it is similar to the Raymond Chandler novel, for these themes of loss are certainly central to the text. There is similarity too in that both song and novel are quite preposterously epic. Note the lack of capitalisation, which is as a hint at a smaller, human scale grandeur that Simple Minds, to my mind, would lose as they became more successful, but that Chandler retained, and indeed honed, in all of his further work.

Chandler’s The Big Sleep’ is flawed of course, and that is part of its charm. Both the novel and the film are just a shade too long, although I dare say that 21st Century film audiences would think two hours a ‘short’. The novel has the feel of several short stories bundled together, which is hardly surprising because that’s pretty much what Chandler was doing with his long form works. That patchwork, cut-up collagist approach is most evident, I think, in ‘The Big Sleep’ and this surely lends it a bizarre, almost Dadaist quality. It’s notable then that when the Coen brothers made their magnificent homage to the novel in their ’The Big Lebowski’ film of 1998, they threw some crazy Germanic techno conceptual artists into the mix, as if the brothers recognised the connections from the novel into the realm of the cut-up. Was Julianna Moore channeling Hannah Hoch in the film? Who knows. But it would make some kind of (non)sense if she had been.

Chandler’s short stories are great pieces, and for someone who has an avowed distaste for the short story in general, and the crime/detective short story in particular, that is really saying something. The tough school hard-boiled form of the stories published in the Black Mask pulp magazine work magnificently well however. It’s like the form was waiting for the American pulps to really explode into life. Bam! Pow! Whaaaam! Those stories are like Pop Art comic strips in pared back prose, all rusty shivs and snub nosed revolvers to the guts. Flowers in the dustbin. Under the paving stones, not exactly the beach but rather blood stains and withered hopes. And the American tough school short stories work in a way that English detective short stories do not simply because, for the most part, there is not really any mystery to solve. There is no puzzle other than the one of how to make a fast buck or escape an early death. There are primitive impulses in the tough-school short stories that are ultimately rewarding in such brief explosions of action. The English, by contrast, feel tiresomely trapped in attempts to condense the pleasure of the long-form detective puzzle into something that is not really fit for purpose. This is just a feeling I get, you understand, a set of personal prejudices and preferences not really backed up by evidence other than the frustrations felt when leafing through another one of those British Library Crime Classics collections of themed short stories. When will I learn?

‘The Big Sleep’ then is all marvellously disjointed and nonsensical. Of course Chandler plays the Christie card at the end when Marlowe, in what might just be a parody of Poirot, lays out all the facts and shows us his workings in the margins. If I’m being gleefully cynical too I might say that Chandler is taking a pop at Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr’s predilection for complexity and absurd cleverness. Marlowe never comes across as clever. Instead Marlowe is smart. Except when he isn’t, and then he’s showing us how human he is, which is maybe even better than being clever. Or smart.

Is there something then in ‘The Big Sleep’ about the need humans seem to have for making connections between things, and how ridiculous that can often be? How it can lead us into traps and blind alleys just as well as to enlightenment? There is something magnificently random (to coin a popular early 21st Century phrase) in ‘The Big Sleep’ which is exaggerated by Marlowe/Chandler making his explanation of the connectivity between those apparently random elements. One comes away from ‘The Big Sleep’ feeling that there is no real resolution to anything, that all the ‘making sense’ of things is just so much flim-flam and that it is in the embracing of the disjointed where enlightenment can be found. Don’t try too hard. Listen to the universe. Some things just happen… The Dude in ‘The Big Lebowski’ would undoubtedly agree with this.

Let’s get back to that idea about the nature of the American tough school of writing as found in the pages of the pulps, though, because there can be a temptation to applaud the gritty ‘realism’ of the writing as being ‘authentic’. This is something I do not hold with, for there is no such thing as authenticity in art. That’s a bold statement, I know, but there it is. Now I suspect that in 2024 there is much less discussion around the nature of authenticity in art forms than there was towards the end of the naughties. Back then it was all the rage, as I recall, to praise certain things as being ‘authentic’ and to damn others as being ‘manufactured’. This mostly happened in the realms of music criticism, specifically in the area of ‘alternative’ music where it was utilised as a means of elevating the critic’s and therefore the audience’s perceived taste. It was all utter nonsense of course, and Yuval Taylor and Hugh Barker punctured the whole thing in their tremendous ‘Faking It’ book of 2007. Barker in particular is an interesting character to me, not least because of his work with the band Animals That Swim whose quirky, literate pop music remains criminally underrated and invisible. In 2012 he also published a book about the history of Britain’s (read England’s) curious obsession with hedges, but that is (literally) another story.

That notion of the authentic voice is certainly one that prevailed around the reception to the tough school of American pulp writing in the first half of the twentieth century. There was a feeling that the writers were writing of, and from The Street, that they were telling the authentic stories of the blue-collar worker, the hard working man and the devious, scheming woman. Gender and racial stereotypes guaranteed to split the atom of 21st Century opinion, yes, but also peculiarly tantalising period pieces. The writers of these short sharp stories gave off the feeling that they knew what they were writing about, that they were living on the same streets, eking out the same tough lives, striving for the same American Dream whilst simultaneously shining a flashlight on the corruption dwelling at the heart of that very dream. The filth and the fury. No surprise then that there would be something similar in the Rock’n’Roll aesthetic of the 1950s and in the Punk explosion of the late 1970s, peculiar flamboyant eruptions of outrage and Working Class rebellion that would both be so rapidly subsumed into the Capitalist Machine.

Dashiell Hammett might have once served some time as a Pinkerton detective agent before starting to write his hard-boiled prose, but the majority of the others were not writing from ‘experience’ of The Street at all, but rather were working to the template of the tough school form that very rapidly took shape. Having said that I do not hold with notions of authenticity it should be clear that I do not say this pejoratively. Indeed, whilst re-reading some of these old Black Mask stories, and Chandler’s novels in particular, it strikes me that there is a strong correlation between them and the the work of Bruce Springsteen, which is high praise indeed.

Now my relationship with the work of Bruce Springsteen is even more easily described than the one I have had with Simple Minds. In the most basic summation it goes something like: decades of hatred bleeding into a year or two of begrudging admiration (starting around 2003 when I heard a cover of ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ by obscure Scottish indie band Ballboy) blossoming into obsessive love from around 2015 onwards. The obsessive love has weathered in the past couple of years into something that I’d like to think of as more mature and measured, but it is no less passionate for all that.

It may have been that coming late to an appreciation of Springsteen allowed me to sidestep, to a large extent, the sense of his work as being some kind of authentic blue-collar documentary of Americana, but I admit that I laughed out loud when, during his acclaimed ‘Springsteen on Broadway’ performances of 2017, he explicitly ‘admitted’ to having made it all up. The ‘authenticity’ that was baked into the mythology of Springsteen was a sham, an artifice, an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. Well of course it was. Yet this does not make it any less powerful or less enticing to us. If anything it makes the magic even more special, takes the ‘everyman/person’ notion inherent in the narrative of the work and turns it inside out. The everyday becomes spectacular because it actually isn’t the everyday, but an artistic interpretation, where the deceit of manipulation is so cleverly disguised that the line between the mediated and the ‘real’ is magically dissolved. Each becomes the other in a never ending dance.

I see this dance in the work of Raymond Chandler too, particularly in ‘Farewell My Lovely and his last ‘proper’ novel ‘The Long Goodbye’ (it’s fairly easy to sidestep the posthumously published ‘Playback’). In both these books Chandler finesses the rough edges of ‘The Big Sleep’ into something that is not exactly polished, but certainly somewhat more cohesive. Marlowe still moves through the world of the novel in such a way that he attracts coincidences from which he moulds connection and meaning, but the plots at least feel a little more considered. This is particularly true of ‘The Long Goodbye’ which is a masterpiece of detective fiction masquerading as a literary novel or vice versa. More than ever with ‘The Long Goodbye’ this is Chandler casting a withering eye over the landscape of America in its supposed post-war prosperity and finding it morally lacking. The book is threaded with observations and asides, many of them put in the mouth of Marlowe, that rail on the iniquity of wealth and the systemic corruption that supports and drives that iniquity. Not that Chandler seems particularly interested in making political observations or taking Political sides. Rather ‘The Long Goodbye’ is something of an existential take on ‘civilised’ society. It is a novel that is unceasingly bleak, its blackest depths lightened by Marlowe’s sharp one-liners that merely act to emphasise the depths into which he, and we, are made to look.

It is largely accepted that ‘The Long Goodbye’ is Chandler getting up close and personal to himself and, on the evidence of the two characters (alcoholic writer Roger Wade and alcoholic wastrel Terry Lennox) not finding much in himself to admire. As if to add insult to (personal) injury, the things that Marlowe does find to like in these characters turn out to be flickers of potential smothered by lies and deceit. Like I say, it is not exactly cheery stuff, which is no real surprise given that the novel was written as his wife Cissy was slowly suffering through a long illness. Cissy died the year after the novel was published. A long goodbye indeed.

For all that it remains a thoroughly readable book, its determinedly existential outlook made bearable and even perversely enjoyable by donning the garb of the detective novel. Robert Altman’s 1973 film of the novel managed much the same kind of trick, though this time oddly because it was positioned as a satirical take on the Noir/hard boiled school. If I remain somewhat unconvinced by Altman’s film it is likely because I think I have something of a mistrust of satire, and ‘issues’ based comedy generally. Much of it leaves me cold at best, irritated at worst. That’s no doubt the intended effect, and it all points to my being a cold and humourless fish, but there we are.

Not that Altman’s film is a comedy of course, and actually it no longer seems as irritating as it once did, and that is to its credit. Or perhaps to mine, who knows. It still feels definitively a 1970s picture in that it is pedestrian, vague, values visual style over narrative to a frustrating degree and outstays its welcome. Then again, I have yet to see an Altman film I did not think this about, which doubtless just goes to prove what an illiterate philistine I am.

If you had asked me twenty years ago I would have told you that Altman’s film is the poorest of all the cinematic adaptations of Chandler’s novels and massively overshadowed by the novel itself. That shadowing is still significant, but the film has at least managed to embed itself in the pack of pictures that are at least as good as each other. Or as bad, depending on which way the wind is blowing and how violently I happen to be considering the differences between the written and the filmic text, none of which I really know anything about except for instinctual reactions and feelings that hover somewhere on the edge of intelligence. As I am proving here.

My Texan friend William has told me that he remembers a critic making a comment about Altman’s film, something along the lines of Marlowe running around a lot but not really solving anything and this being evidence of Altman’s deconstruction of the Marlowe character. Which kind of begs the question of whether the critic in question might actually have read ‘The Long Goodbye’ or indeed any Chandler novel. ‘Running around a lot but not really solving anything’ is pretty much Marlowe’s raison d’être. It is what Marlowe does. All the time. His purpose is not to solve anything in the traditional detective novel sense, but to assemble meaning from disjointed elements. His is a character that acts as a conduit for events. Things happen to, and around Marlowe. He’s literally an agent of reaction, an ingredient that brings situations to their head. The whole ’solve a mystery’ thing is so far down the list of important elements in the Tough School of writers to the point of being an irrelevance, or maybe an irritation that the writer needs to scratch occasionally, knowing that scratching just makes the itch worse.

Reading Raymond Chandler in 2024 (or whenever) is to realise that whilst the challenges (and rewards) of existence may take on slightly different forms throughout history, the underlying irritations remain timeless. One of the roles of great artists then is perhaps to take on the burden of recognition, to make work that addresses those irritations and in so doing create a balm for the rest of us. Chandler’s preposterous tales of the human condition paradoxically create pockets of calm for us to linger in. He mined the dark recesses so that we might find them marginally less frightening. That’s a lot to be thankful for.

Investigating nostalgia with young Americans

In the 1963 Poirot novel ‘The Clocks’, as we have seen, Agatha Christie uses one of the rare appearances of her little Belgian detective to engage in an amusing and informative exposition on the history of detective fiction. For the most part this focuses on some key French authors, a smattering of English (it would not do, one assumes, for Christie to be seen to throw either stones or bouquets in her own glass house) and a rogue appearance by the overrated American Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr. When the subject of the hard-boiled ‘tough school’ of detective fiction comes up, however, Poirot dismisses it “much as he would have waved [away] an intruding fly or mosquito.” “‘Violence for violence’ sake?” he continues. “Since when has that been interesting?” 

It is a cutting riposte that, in the context of what he has just said about other authors and schools of thought, is perhaps a cute play on Christie’s part to show Poirot as being somewhat old fashioned and out of touch. In 1963, after all, the literary value of the hard-boiled school was surely well established  whilst the publicity-seeking fencing between the protagonists on opposite sides of the Atlantic would be largely a thing of the past. Indeed, after a pause for breath and thought, Hercules Christie admits that they rate “American crime fiction on the whole” in  “a pretty high place” and considers it “more ingenious, more imaginative than English writing.” One does of course rather wonder just what American crime fiction Agatha Poirot is thinking of here, if not any of the ‘tough school’. Mr John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr? One sincerely hopes not. Ellery Queen then?

When talking about American detective fiction it is likely that the name Ellery Queen was amongst the first I became aware of. Not the novels or short stories, you understand, but the character played by Jim Hutton in the American TV series. Screened in the UK by the BBC in 1976, it is one of the few television shows I can recall watching with the rest of my family. Seeing it again in 2024 is something of a shock of nostalgia, the layers of time travel being overlaid with mis-remembrance. Do I remember the show as being set in the late 1940s? What would that have even meant to a ten year old in 1976? Did I confuse or conflate Jim Rockford’s 1970s California with Jim Hutton’s 1940s New York? When Hutton/Ellery turned to camera, broke the fourth wall and suggested that I was probably way ahead of him and had spotted the murderer, did I ever nod and smugly announce that I was and that I had? As if. What was the fourth wall anyway? And at what point did I realise that there were actual Ellery Queen novels other than the imaginary ones Jim Hutton was writing in the show? History is obscure on the answer to the last one, although I can at least say with some certainty that it was not until 2021 that I finally read some real Ellery Queen books. ‘The French Powder Mystery’, ‘The Spanish Cape Mystery’ and ‘The Greek Coffin Mystery’ all struck me as much more rooted in English detective fiction than the raw rough and tumble of the Black Mask school and whilst they struck me as adequate period pieces they did little to really thrill me. I’m sure that the more puzzle-orientated aspect of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee’s writing as Ellery Queen would have appealed to Poirot and Christie much more than they have done to me, and that is fine of course.

In terms of The Americans though, I am fairly certain that before the Ellery Queen TV show came into my orbit, there would have been a few books on my childhood bookshelf bearing the names of Carolyn Keen and Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike the Famous Five and Agatha Christie paperbacks, none of these Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys titles survived the occasional purges of personal history that I would have scowled through in my teens and twenties, but they are certainly worth thinking about again now, particularly as my rudimentary research about the Ellery Queen TV series suggests that the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew TV show of 1977-79 was screened by the BBC during 1979. Oddly (or not) I have no recollection of this at all. Archive ‘Radio Times’ listings show that it was broadcast on a late Saturday afternoon, after the Sport and Regional News (‘Scoreboard’ in Scotland ) and before a Rolf Harris show. Has some strange subliminal cancellation process seeped from the Harris reference and erased my Nancy Drew memories? Is memory in fact like ferric cassette or video tape, breaking up over time?  Well, mine has clearly unravelled from the case and no amount of rewinding with a pencil is going to help.

Looking online at the covers of the Drew and Hardy Boys titles published in the UK throughout the 1970s as Armada paperbacks brings slightly more of a flicker of recognition, particularly those yellow box Nancy Drew covers with the Peter Arthur illustrations. These may not be particularly memorable from a design perspective, but I admit that the sight of a red headed Nancy glancing over her shoulder in an anxious manner stirs the ancient memory of a ten year old’s crush. This is another piece of evidence for my not having seen the TV series, for I feel sure that my thirteen year old self could not have failed to have found Pamela Sue Martin incredibly crush-worthy.  Then again, at that age I would have struggled to see further than a girl called Veronica who sat beside me in Chemistry classes. This, of course, decades before she would find fame on British television screens as Ronni Ancona and surprise me by cropping up as Steve Coogan’s PA in the tremendous second series of ‘The Trip’. Seeing her there on screen oddly transported me back to 1979, sitting at the bottom of the stairs for hours trying to summon the courage to phone her number and ask her out. The anti-climax of finally hearing her say ‘no’ was, of course, savagely dispiriting. The following week she had moved tables in Chemistry and to say I missed hearing her passionate raving about Dustin Hoffman in my ear would be an understatement. I wonder if she ever read Nancy Drew stories? Wonder too if she was ever famous enough to get to meet Hoffman in person. I hope so.

I did re-read some Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew stories recently and found it an interesting experience. The first few Drew novels, ghostwritten in the early 1930s by Mildred Wirt Benson still read as thoroughly enjoyable mystery adventures. Wholesome fun, fired through with the kind of old-fashioned conservative American family values that knee-jerk jerks of a right leaning proclivity might suggest they are fighting to protect today. Nonsense, of course, for what comes over in these early Drew stories is a fundamental sense of decency and fairness that would seem to be anathema to much of 21st Century America. Shame.

Have The Hardy Boys aged as handsomely? Well, not to my eyes, although this is admittedly based on a very small selection of Leslie McFarlane penned books from the late 1920s and early 1930s. These, such as the 1928 title ‘Hunting For Hidden Gold’, read now as ridiculously robust action adventures that are fuelled more by testosterone and machismo than by anything so subtle as a mystery to be solved. Did I enjoy this kind of nonsense as a ten year old? I like to think not so much, and see this is a reason for their exclusion from those bookshelves where Enid Blyton was allowed to stay. Nancy Drew should certainly have been given a reprieve though.

Then there would be the Three Investigators books. Or, more accurately, ‘Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators’. In truth these would have been my brother’s paperbacks and I know there are at least a couple still surviving in our childhood home. Indeed, we were discussing them just recently, me in the midst of some re-reading and him going through the tortuous process of remembering The Past. It is interesting how some very clear specific memories can become ensnared by other flickers of recollection, a process which itself transforms that specific reality into something different. For example, my brother vividly recalls something about how ultra-low frequency sounds, whilst being inaudible to our ears, can nevertheless generate feelings of unease and terror. He remembers reading that when he was a young boy and credits this with being the start of a lifetime’s interest in science. The thing is, he has for many years put that memory together with Enid Bylton’s Secret Seven books (he was Secret Seven, I was Famous Five), whilst in fact it is something that is key to the solution of the first Three Investigators book, ‘The Secret of Terror Castle’. Now whilst I know I also read ‘Terror Castle’ as a youngster that fact about low-frequencies made little or no impact, and it was only my recent re-reading that allowed me to reposition the ‘truth’ in my brother’s memory. Part of me feels guilty about this, a sadness at fracturing a decades old connection for him between Blyton and the mysteries of science. Part of me too wonders what ‘truth’ will stick in, say, another ten or twenty years time. Will the neural connections long established in my brother’s brain between The Secret Seven and low frequency oscillation reestablish themselves and once again triumph over the ‘reality’? There’s a science experiment for him to ponder.

So there is certainly something interesting about the pursuit of cold scientific proof in The Three Investigators. It’s all very ‘Scooby Doo’, particularly in the first few books, in that the mysteries of haunted houses, spectral apparitions and whispering Egyptian mummies can be debunked by the application of cool deduction and scientific process. And yes, the adult criminals would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the pesky kids…

There is also something interesting about the Three Investigators books being in many ways promotional materials for The American Dream. Start a business! Get a celebrity endorsement! Design a memorable logo and branding! Promote yourselves at every opportunity! Run another job on the side! Work all the hours under the sun! It’s all there. Of course the capitalist propagandising of those themes was way over my head as a ten year old but they stand out strongly when reading them again in 2024. Yet what also comes over in at least the early books is something about the triumph of the nerdy outsider. The Three Investigators may not be wacky Out There weirdoes, but neither are they the kind of archetypal privileged Californian kid that we were encouraged to despise in, say, John Hughes’ films of the 1980s. That kind of young adult is embodied by the Skinny Norris character in The Three Investigators, and although his is at best a bit part, he does remind us what Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews are not. What they are is irregular regular kids, characters who inhabit a strange kind of mediated middle ground in society, strangely untouched by the weird Pop Sub-Cultural happenings that would have been exploding around them in their contemporary mid to late 1960s California. These early books penned by Robert Arthur at least seem to exist in a strange pre-Pop realm, one that casts back to a pre-war Hollywood, which is apt given that by 1964 Alfred Hitchcock had the vast majority of his film-making career behind him. The preponderance of Egyptian mummies, movie stars of the silent screen and the abandoned mansions and estates of dubious 19th Century merchants makes The Three Investigators seem like conduits for conservative nostalgia. Again, this would have been lost on a ten year old in 1976 as it likely would have been on a ten year old in 1966. Yet this layering of nostalgia, where multiple coats of mediated memory have built up over the space of many decades now lend these books a peculiar patina. They belong elsewhere, or at least elsewhen, and part of their charm now is that they no longer seem to know what that might be themselves. 

I know how that feels.

Backwards and Forwards with Agatha Christie

Several books on sailing. A couple about English Springer Spaniels. Some James Herriot novels from that time in the 1970s when everyone read about vets, and some collections of Thirlwell cartoons. The bookshelf has not changed since my dad died just as 2014 blinked itself free of a new year’s hangover. In truth I don’t think the bookshelf had changed much in the preceding decades. Certainly the small collection of Agatha Christie paperbacks that I read in my youth are still there, the Tom Adams cover illustrations so very evocative of time and place.

Having said that, I have to admit that I am still not entirely certain when I would have bought and read them, (my) memory being such a fickle thing. Oddly, I see now they are almost exclusively later Christies, and hence hardly her finest work. ‘Postern Of Fate’. ‘The Clocks’. ‘Elephants Can Remember’. There is a 1978 edition of ‘Death On The Nile’ with Peter Ustinov cut out and pasted in front of the Sphinx and ’NOW A SPECTACULAR NEW FILM’ in the bottom corner. On the back cover a grid of stills from the film shows the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Lois Chiles, George Kennedy and Maggie Smith. Glancing at these images now, two key things occur to me. The first is that Jane Birkin looks fabulous (of course she does) and the second is that I wonder if this was the first Agatha Christie book that I bought. If so though, when, and why? I’m sure the two answers must to connected, but my cursory sleuthing does not help much. I’m almost certain I would not have seen the film at the cinema on its release, and the television premiere was not until Christmas Day, 1982, when it was the BBC’s Big Christmas Film. It started at 8.15pm, immediately after ‘The Two Ronnies Christmas Show’ (special guest David Essex!) so I feel much more secure (or do I?) in saying I would have watched it then. Was it then my first exposure to Christie and Poirot? It is certainly possible, yet this would have made me an angsty 16 year old, with barely a year of schooling still ahead of me. By Christmas 1982 I had already been to the Glasgow School of Art twice (once for an open day, once to a night time fashion show) and had my head blown, metaphorically speaking, by the weirdness and wildness I’d glimpsed there. Even in my cloistered bedroom existence then I’m certain that by 1982 surely Poirot and Christie would have felt tame and oddly childish. Wouldn’t they? This train of thought is certainly backed by the printing dates in almost all the other Christie’s in my childhood bedroom. These are are all 1978 or 1979, which rather suggests that the film tie-in might actually have been picked up at the time of printing rather than as a result of finally seeing it on television. More than this, I wonder if by this point, hovering close to my 16th birthday, I was not already tiring of Christie and preparing to reinvent myself as some miserable existential Art Student for whom books by the likes of Agatha Christie were so much frippery. Perhaps by the time 8.15pm on Christmas Day 1982 came around I was already ensconced in my bedroom with a smuggled-in bottle of red and Camus under the covers.

As if.

Why though would I have picked up any of Agatha Christie’s books at all? As with Enid Blyton, the answer is long since lost to me. Perhaps it was simply an extension of that childhood affection for mystery and adventure, multiplied by the small-town economic necessity of only seeing Big Names and bestsellers in the book store. Looking again at those Tom Adams’ covers, however, I do wonder whether it was this which prompted me to pick them up in the first place. Wildly imaginative and mildly hallucinatory, they are perhaps an homage to a 1960s/70s interest in progressive ideas that is nicely in contrast to the somewhat more conservative worlds inhabited by Christie’s words. Not that I would have any concept of such things at the time, just as I would have been wholly ignorant of notable New York musician/artist Lou Reed, who was certainly a fan. Whilst he might have been more inspired by Adams’ illustrations for a series of 1970s reissues of Raymond Chandler’s Noir novels (it is, after all, a long way from St Mary Mead to Manhattan, although it is amusing to think of Joan Hickson as Jane Marple replacing Mo Tucker to recite lines about the “Apelike and tactile bassoon” in ‘The Murder Mystery’ on the eponymous Velvet Underground LP of 1969) he certainly commissioned the illustrator for the cover of his 1972 debut solo album. A long way too from Warhol and his Pop Art bananas. Then again, perhaps not, for Adams’ works often look like hand painted collages; meticulous watercolour studies of Dada assemblages with visual references abounding.

Whether I was drawn to Adams’ illustrations or not, however, the reality is likely to be that I was reading and enjoying Christie in my mid teens, and there is something quite comforting in that thought now. Did I read more Christie in books borrowed from the library? Unsurprisingly, I do not remember, but I think it unlikely. Certainly when I started conscientiously reading the Poirot series in order back in 2012 there was little, if anything, that seemed even vaguely familiar. So no, I hardly think that I would have been as splendidly immersed in Christie as, say, detective fiction historian Curtis Evans, who admits to have been devouring Poirot when he was 12, or my friend Clare who similarly had read all of Christie’s works (encouraged, I believe, by a librarian parent) by the time she became a teenager. Another friend with whom I share almost identical interests in music and detective fiction tells me that, like Evans, he had read Christie when he was 11, led there perhaps inevitably from Sherlock Holmes. Chapeau to them all, even if they do make me feel ashamed of my ill-informed eleven year old self. Then again, don’t we all feel something similar about our young selves when we begin to glance into the barrel of our sixties?

Chapeau also to Lucy Worsley, whose BBC show and accompanying book (or was it the other way round?) in 2023 were both highly entertaining and informative. In all of her work Worsley pulls off the tremendous trick of being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible, which is not unlike Christie herself of course (or Agatha as Worsley says repeatedly in her book/show as if she is on chummy first name terms, which I’m sure would be the case had they been contemporaries) and no doubt explains something of their continued success.

That point about Christie’s work being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible is, I think, critical to understanding her appeal. Like Enid Blyton, Christie appears to have almost sub-consciously understood what appeals to the audience and then delivered it in truck loads. Both authors’ almost supernatural abilities to channel the elements necessary for success is uncanny. It is easy to throw such a notion in the air, of course, but whilst I do believe there is more than a little magic involved in the process of such successful writing, what should also never be overlooked is the sheer amount of time put in at the coalface, as it were. Endless hours spent tapping it out. Tap tap tap, typewriter keys reverberating in solitary confinement. Putting in the hard miles. No shortcuts. Though having the magic on your side helps soften the pain, perhaps.

Critically speaking, one will certainly find more people willing to take up the defence for Christie than for Enid Blyton (Nicholas Royle and his tremendous ‘David Bowie, Enid Bolton and the sun machine’ book notwithstanding), but she remains too often a sniffy shorthand reference for being intellectually substandard. For example, in a review of the 2024 film ‘Wicked Little Letters’, Claire Armitstead in The Guardian suggests that the screenplay “blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories”. Now I’m not going to haul Armistead over the coals for this line, and nor have I seen the film in question, but nevertheless I do think it a somewhat lazy observation, a slightly tired and jaded repetition of a widely accepted notion that is not really supported by the evidence of Christie’s writing. Indeed, to my mind there is actually very little, if any, ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction that is ‘cosy’. ‘Cosy’ feels to me instead a style that is a more modern reinterpretation of Golden Age detective fiction, one inevitably additionally influenced by other media, notably television, film and the entire Nostalgia Industry. Where I do agree with Armitstead though is in the pejorative use of the word, for ‘cosy crime’ to me is certainly something best avoided. I know the style has innumerable supporters and I am very happy about the pleasures they get from the books, but whilst I have tried some of the self-proclaimed ‘cosy’ books/authors of the contemporary era I find them (with only the rarest of exceptions) unutterably dull. Can you see my eyes rolling and my head lolling off to sleep?

Christie does use the word, of course, notably early in ‘Murder Is Easy’ when she describes a certain Miss Pinkerton as being “very cosy and English”. Of course it’s not Christie who says this at all, it is her character Luke Fitzwilliam, a somewhat vapid young chap who is certainly one of the more easily forgettable of Christie’s amateur sleuths. Now ‘Murder is Easy’ is one of Christie’s standalone pieces, but whilst Christie had written only one Miss Marple novel when it was published, one rather thinks that Jane was on her mind. The books is filled with old ladies about whom, as with Miss Pinkerton, there is “something very cosy and English” but that also “are as sharp as nails in some ways”. One can’t help but wonder if the book might have begun life as a prototype Marple before Christie decided that the (spoiler alert!) serial killer theme leant more towards the blood thirsty realm of the thriller than the more subtle disquiet of the Jane Marple universe. Indeed, the book does rather get lost in its latter stages, falling a little too much into the rampaging action of the thriller genre for my tastes, but it is all carried off exuberantly well regardless. And this is the crux of the thing with Christie, and with ‘Murder is Easy’ in particular. For whilst it is too easy to think of Christie books as being ‘cosy’, so too is it to play up the darkness that underpins the (multiple) crimes committed in their pages. Christie (like many Golden Age crime writers) is more complex than that, but crucially, only slightly more so. It is the combination of those contrasting flavours and the injection of the intangible Entertainment ingredient that make them so enjoyable. As Christie says herself in ‘Murder Is Easy’: “Gossip and malice and scandal – all so delicious if one takes them in the right spirit!” Quite the cocktail.

Perhaps more interestingly Christie uses the word ‘cosy’ in a late Poirot novel (1963’s ‘The Clocks’). As much as such a thing is possible in a Poirot mystery, it’s a throwaway line at the end of a chapter. Someone has found a dead body and is recovering from the shock with a nice cup of tea. “It all sounds very cosy”suggests Colin Lamb, one of the book’s narrators, and it is. Of course it is. It’s Agatha Christie poking fun at herself. On your 34th Poirot novel you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?

‘The Clocks’ is not, I think, regarded as one of the better Poirot novels but I admit I find it enormously entertaining and interesting. It reads now like an author throwing caution to the wind, a writer being a little lackadaisical but still reassuringly having their wits about them. ‘The Clocks’ feels like Christie playing with the form, teasing the expectations. So it’s a Poirot mystery where Poirot (now getting on a bit in years) barely appears, and apart from making a flourish with the solution at the end, is mostly there to put some kind of proof to the eternal Poirot insistence that it is in the exercising of “the little grey cells” where mysteries are solved, not in the running around looking for clues. Poirot and Christie leave this to the aforementioned Colin Lamb and Detective Inspector Hardcastle who, for relatively minor Christie characters, are pleasantly sketched. The mystery at the core of the novel, Poirot suggests as soon as he is appraised of the facts, is so apparently complicated that it must, in truth, be very simple. Naturally he is proved to be right, but not before the author takes us on something of a rollercoaster ride of investigation.

The other, perhaps more important (and certainly more amusing) role that Poirot plays in the ‘The Clocks’ is to provide us with an exposition on detective fiction itself, thereby positioning the novel as an enjoyably post-modern meta-fictional work. Well, perhaps that is over-stating the case, but whatever.

Now I told myself that I would not pepper this piece with lengthy quotations, yet the sequence in which Poirot waxes lyrically about detective fiction is so marvellously done that it rather demands it. Poirot/Christie kicks off with Anna K. Green’s 1878 novel ‘The Leavenworth Case’, a copy of which he hands to Lamb, who comments that it is “going back quite a long time… my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.” Poirot though insists that “It is admirable… One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama.” Lamb has a point, for ‘The Leavenworth Case’ is a mite ‘old-fashioned’. Unusually for a 19th Century novel, however, it does not leave me cold and indeed is certainly worth, ahem, investigating. Christie/Poirot too, though, is quite right about its “deliberate melodrama” and its “period atmosphere.” Of course the writer is making the same point about her own work, looking backwards and forwards through time. She acknowledges the criticism. Celebrates it even.

Poirot continues to Maurice Leblanc’s ‘Adventures of Arsene Lupin’ of which he enthuses: “How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.” Here too Poirot/Christie makes a fine point, for the stories of Leblanc are great fun and there is certainly something of Lupin in, say, Leslie Charteris’ character of Simon Templar, aka The Saint. It’s interesting that when Christie was writing ‘The Clocks’ Simon Templar himself was being resuscitated by Roger Moore in a TV show for Beat Boom Britain. The slippage of time backwards and forwards, repeating.

The next piece of classic detective fiction on Poirot’s (or is it Christie’s?) agenda is Gaston Leroux’s novel of 1907 ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’. “Ah, that is really a classic!” gushes Christie (or is it Poirot?) “I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach!… Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.” The novel is certainly another excellent point of reference, but I wonder how accurate it is to suggest that, in 1963 it should be “almost forgotten.” Certainly by 1981 it was anything but, being rated as the third best locked room mystery by a poll carried out amongst mystery writers and reviewers. Since then it appears to have been seldom out of print. Perhaps Poirot/Christie helped to revive interest?

Then, of course, there is Arthur Conan Doyle, about whom Hercules Christie opines that the “tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived.” This is an opinion that I’m in wholehearted agreement with, the Holmes stories and novels never quite connecting with me beyond the thrill of rollicking adventures. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I did come to Holmes and Conan Doyle later in life, and anyway, the short story form has never really done much for me. However, before one can nod too much in agreement, Agatha Poirot continues with a qualification to the opinion, stating that “the art of the writing—ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.”

The reference to Watson is, naturally, an excuse for Christie (and one gets the sense it really is Christie and not Poirot, even though the words are voiced by the little Belgian) to bring up her own Watsonesque construct. The use of the estimable Hastings as the narrative voice for many of the earlier Poirots is unquestionably in homage to Conan Doyle and one rather gets the feeling from this particular scene in ‘The Clocks’ that Christie is expressing regret at leaving him behind, as it were, having banished the poor chap to the depths of Argentina. Perhaps too it is a sneaky preview of Hastings’ return in the final Poirot novel ‘Curtain’, written some twenty years previously and locked in a vault awaiting final publication. After ‘The Clocks’ there would ultimately be another decade and a bit (and three further novels) to wait, but perhaps Christie was getting antsy, or maybe just looking in the eyes of fate and wondering how much longer there would be before…

Interestingly too there is a nod in the ‘The Clocks’ to the first novel (1934’s ‘‘Unfinished Portrait’) that Christie published under her pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Now I cannot in all honesty recommend ‘Unfinished Portrait’ for it feels laboured and tediously self-indulgent to my mind, although admittedly, as a piece of semi-autobiographical writing it does provide some insights into Christie’s life. Lucy Worsley perceptively makes something of this in her book/show but is generally more positive than I can bring myself to be. Instead, I enjoy rather more the fleeting piece of self-reference in ‘The Clocks’, where our friend Mr Lamb happens to stumble upon a young girl observing the world (and, crucially, The Scene Of The Crime’) through opera glasses from an upper flat window. The young girl is confined to the flat in a plaster cast, so it is all very ‘Rear Window’, but there is much in what the character says and thinks that recollects the young Christie/Westmacott of ‘Unfinished Portrait’. Whilst the whole scene is, like much of the entire novel, preposterous (did no-one think of safeguarding measures in 1963?!) it is, I think, intentionally so. Detective fiction is by definition preposterous after all. Hasn’t Poirot already made that clear to us in his little exposition? Perhaps then my suggestion that ‘The Clocks’ is a piece of meta-fiction about the process of making fiction is not so wide of the mark? I shall let the academics argue that out in private whilst I settle back with a sherry.

Let’s go back to that Poirot exposition for moment though, because he’s not finished. With bright eyes he suggests that we “take the works of John Dickson Carr or Carter Dickson, as he calls himself sometimes”. Me, I call the American author John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr and if I were Lamb I should answer with the riposte of “let’s not.” Except… except I cannot quite escape from mentioning John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr, if only to point out what I think is one of the more interesting aspects of Christie’s work. It’s all to do with cleverness, or assumed cleverness, or imagined cleverness, or no cleverness at all. To puzzle or not to puzzle, that might be the question.

Personally I don’t think I have ever particularly bothered about the puzzle for the puzzle’s sake in any piece of mystery or detective fiction and I strongly believe that Agatha Christie would side with me on this one. For whilst it is inescapable that the puzzle aspect of her mysteries is one of the most enduring facets of the work, it never seems to overpower everything else. Indeed, the puzzle can often just be the arresting hook on which to hang everything else, which are conversations and observations and a strong narrative drive. Let’s Get On With The Story indeed.

The solutions to the puzzles of the crimes in Christie’s books do sometimes feel tortuously convoluted, yet, as Poirot pointedly makes clear in ‘The Clocks’ they are also often fiendishly simple because the motivations behind the crimes are such. I don’t think one ever comes away from a Christie novel feeling that the author has been insufferably clever. Her characters, arguably, sometimes, and Poirot, yes, certainly and almost all the time. This is one of his defining characteristics after all and I suspect one of the reasons that Christie grew to despise him. Jane Marple? Heaven forbid. Which is probably why Marple is Christie’s greatest character and perhaps the one most like herself. She is disarmingly, self-deprecatingly, charmingly yet incisively clever.

The same also feels true of, say, Dorothy L Sayers. Her Lord Peter Wimsey character can sometimes come across as insufferably smug yet, despite often spending an interminable amount of time unpacking the finer details of train timetables, Sayers herself never comes across as intellectually aloof. John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr on the other hand most assuredly does, as do several other male authors I could name but won’t partly because I don’t want to fall into the trap of negativity but mostly because my memory fails me and I can’t think of any names off the top of my head.

John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr novels are always preposterous but only occasionally pleasurably so. More often, as with every book I have had the misfortune to read featuring the appallingly insufferable Dr Gideon Fell, they are simply interminably dull expositions of the novelist’s thought processes barely disguised as Fell unravelling the puzzle to find the solution. Some people, I know, just live for this kind of thing and that is fair enough. To me, though, the Gideon Fell mysteries read like John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr showing off what he considers to be his astounding cleverness, and what an irritatingly masculine cleverness it is. As dull as reading/hearing people’s drug or dream stories.

Perhaps all of this is about the subtle difference between character and writer, fiction and autobiography. Or is it that just what I want to believe? Subjectivity playing tricks on objective logic. Then again, photographer Richard Avedon has suggested that his portraits are more about him than they are the people he photographs, whilst Mary Ellen Mark has said that “every photograph is the photographer’s opinion about something”. In other words, the art is about the artist even when it appears to be objective. So is the difference between Christie and John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr ‘just’ to do with the manner in which each does/does not blur the distinction between self and character? Any number of academic treatises no doubt exist to prove and disprove this. Meanwhile, thank you for indulging the meagre meanders of my mind.

Is there more to be said on Christie? Assuredly yes. For example there might be the absurdity of 21st Century film producers ‘reimagining’ her stories with themes, characters and narrative arcs that are nowhere to be found in the original texts. I don’t by default object to this notion, incidentally. Weaving past and future together into the fleeting moment is what artists do, after all, Christie included. That said, it does amuse me to think of someone coming to the original novel of, say, ‘Murder Is Easy’ after seeing the 2023 BBC adaptation and being surprised to find few of that production’s themes in evidence in the text. Similarly, anyone reading the Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’ on which Kenneth Branagh’s ‘A Haunting In Venice’ film is allegedly based will struggle to find anything remotely similar. Vastly superior, certainly (and it is a ‘lesser Poirot’), but with only the flimsiest of connections.

There could be something to be said too about the sense of place and landscape in Christie’s work. Poirot in Egypt, for example, or Miss Marple in the Caribbean, but mostly something about perception of English landscapes. Cities and villages. The darkness lurking in the shadows, of course, but also their lightness and charm, their cool sophistication and rustic warmth. Perhaps I will revisit these ideas at a later date. For now, though, I’m putting my Christie’s back on the shelf. They might now physically sit there next to Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but in a corner of my mind they are back in a teenage bedroom, rubbing jackets with James Herriott, Thirlwell and books about Springer Spaniels.

Past pleasures

One of the things that most frustrates me about crime and detective novels is when the author springs a piece of previously unmentioned information that allows the detective to solve the case, usually right at the end of the book. It’s a trait most commonly found in novels from the earlier end of the so-called ‘Golden Age’, back there in the 1920s or so when the genre became ridiculously popular and every chancer took a punt at writing a thriller. Clifford Witting employs the, ahem, ‘technique’ in his 1938 novel ‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ (republished recently by Galileo). Witting is such a fine writer, however, that not only does his deployment of this little trick of the trade fail to frustrate, it actually brings a smile of pleasure, for there is a strong sense here that the author is having a great deal of fun playing with the very traditions of the genre in which he is participating. ’Locked room’ or ‘impossible crime’ element? Check. Glasses and fake beard disguise? Check. A victim who appears so perfectly unpleasant a character that we cannot but be rather pleased at his demise? Check. Romantic attraction between detective and suspect, setting up a professional duty/personal interest conflict? Check.

Everything makes for a tremendously well paced and entertaining piece of genre fiction that in its confidence both cosies into and transcends that very genre. Only historical hindsight allows us to position the book as a sort of knowing punctuation point in the genre’s development, yet it is nevertheless difficult to shake off that feeling. It feels faintly like an acknowledgment of the end of something. In this it seems to echo Witting’s ‘Midsummer Murder’, published the previous year (also reissued by Galileo) and filled with metaphorical threats of the approaching cataclysm. The symbolic elements of the 1937 novel may be missing in ‘Michaelmas Goose’ but is is nevertheless interesting to read the book at least partly as something which seeks to capture a last gasp of English society. One eye on an uncertain future, another on a past that is bound to failure. Things are not quite what they seem. Sacrifice is both honourable and despicable; money both an illusory source of freedom and of imprisonment. Love may not conquer all.

As mentioned, Witting employs the Second Rate Detective Novelist’s flimsy trick of withholding evidence from the reader until the end of the book, but gets away with it not just because he is a fine writer, but also because he splits the novel into two distinct books within the whole. The second of these is titled simply ‘The Killing’ and in it Witting employs another genre trope of unwinding the threads of a crime to which we already know the solution. Some readers will find these kinds of detective novels to be frustrating in themselves, simply because they do not allow the puzzle-solving mind to try and work things out and guess ‘whodunnit’, but I admit I find them, for the most part, very enjoyable. Their interest in the psychological and the process of policing feels more Modern and suggests the procedurals that become more prevalent in the post-WW2 years, and Witting does anticipate this to a degree. It also allows him to play to an extent with the traditions of the serialised thriller, and there are moments during ‘The Killing’ when one is put in mind of Ealing comedies ‘Hue and Cry’ and ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’. This is, as you will appreciate, No Bad Thing.

‘The Case Of The Michaelmas Goose’ then is both intellectually rewarding as a rumination on its own genre and a dashed fine read in its own right. It is also another piece of evidence that marks Clifford Witting out as one of the great unknowns, thankfully now reclaimed and given a new audience.

If we have Galileo Publishing to thank for bringing Clifford Witting back into the limelight, then we must thank them also for reissuing Joan Cockin’s work. Having already thoroughly enjoyed her 1949 novel ‘Villainy At Vespers’, in which her Inspector Cam character solves crime during a Cornish summer, I was looking forward to ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ in which Cam makes his first appearance. Although the cover blurb suggests it was also published in 1949, other evidence points to a 1947 first appearance courtesy of Holder and Stoughton. Regardless, ‘Curiosity’ shifts its action slightly Eastwards to the Cotswolds (although if one wanted to be pedantic the cover illustration is of the Exeter Guildhall and High Street in Devon) and takes the opportunity to examine the effects of Government intervention in the rural landscape. This intervention takes the form of a scientific research establishment transitioning from wartime weapons development to the invention of a new Super Fabric on which the success of Britain’s Export Drive depends. As with Witting, Cockin’s novel suggests another Ealing Comedy, this time ‘The Man In The White Suit’, although perhaps more important in the book is the conflict between urban and rural, between Progress and Tradition. There may also be something here about the local frustrations who see effort and resources being expended on the development of something for export rather than easing the difficulties of the home front, as it were. In this, the book does a fine job of gently puncturing the commonly propagated myth of a unified people grimly bearing hardship through wartime and peace. Here there are the human frailties of jealousy and greed, of passion and weakness of spirit and flesh. There is a thread too of espionage, where questions of betrayal of Nations and friendships rear their heads and are, naturally, uncomfortably confronted. Cockin sketches her characters with confident strokes, although oddly Inspector Cam comes across as just a little flimsy, as though the author is struggling to commit to him somewhat. Nevertheless, ‘Curiosity Killed The Cat’ is an excellent first outing for Cam, and the evidence of ‘Villainy at Vespers’ is that Cockin continued to develop her character and to write him some excellent mysteries. One can only hope that Galileo will also turn their hand to the third and final instalment of Cam’s investigations, the 1952 outing ‘Deadly Earnest’. I certainly have my fingers crossed on that front.

I hope too that Galileo will be publishing more by Max Murray, whose ‘The King and the Corpse’ (also originally published in 1949) is another recent reissue. Set in the French Riviera, the book is a lightweight romance thriller, in which Murray, like Cockin, weaves threads of Tradition versus Modern, though this time using the vehicle of a deposed monarchy battling usurping anarchists/republicans/corrupt self-serving lefties, in whose conflict the U.S.A. inevitably has an interested hand. It’s all Rather Good Fun and in the spirit of the likes of Leslie Charteris, to whose Simon Templar character Murray’s (anti)hero Anthony Tolworth might to be at least on nodding terms. There is certainly a fine amount of rip-roaring adventuring to be had as Tolworth seeks to defend his sweetheart Eve Raymond from the clutches of the French police who are equally determined to pin a charge of murder on her. It’s all marvellously ridiculous, with Tolworth’s employer (the aforementioned deposed Monarch) enthusiastically drawn into both the adventure and the romance. Also pulled into the affair is Tolworth’s Aunt Ethelreda, accompanied by two young boys from the prep school of which she is headmistress, all of whom prove essential in eventually unlocking the mystery of the murder that is unveiled in the opening paragraph.


There is something of a rather earthy Jane Marple about the Ethelreda character, and, intriguingly, I found myself also reminded of L.C. Tyler’s Elsie Thirkettle from his marvellous ‘Herring’ series of books. The other key character in those books is, of course, called Ethelred, so you could say that, with a bit of fudging and squeezing at the edges, the pieces of the puzzle fit. There is certainly too a shared humour between Tyler and Murray, both being rather marvellously forthright and deliciously witty. In Murray case, it might be easy to fall into stereotypes and suggest that his, ah, rather direct but enjoyable coarseness is informed by a youth as a bush boy in Australia, but equally it is as likely to be the result of years spent working in newspaper journalism and scriptwriting for the BBC. Certainly one gets the sense from ‘The King and the Corpse’ that Murray might be somewhat dismissive of any unnecessary baggage. Cut to the chase. Tell the story and keep it all moving.

Apparently Murray squeezed twelve novels into the years between the end of WW2 and his death in 1956, eleven of them featuring the word ‘corpse’ in the title. I rather hope that the resuscitation of ‘The King and the Corpse’ is the prelude to more of those being, ah, unearthed in the coming years.

Three’s A Treat

Harriet Rutland first came to my attention back in 2015 or so when I read the Dean Street Press reissue of her 1939 detective novel ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’. This would have been around the time I first came across the Dean Street Press imprint, having gravitated further and further from an immersion in the world of American hardboiled Noir into the realms of the English Golden Age courtesy of the British Library Classic Crime series. This would have been a period when I was still buying more printed books than electronic, and a quick glance up at my shelves suggests that back in 2015 I was rating the likes of Robin Forsyth, Ianthe Jerrold and the Radfords as being of more interest than Rutland. All of those are fine writers whose books I have enjoyed enormously, yet it strikes me now as peculiar that I did not immediately pick up more Rutland’s, particularly as there are only two other titles in her, ahem, criminally small catalogue. Recent re-reading of ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’ assures me of its quality and of Rutland’s class, so I can only assume that I was feeling particularly befuddled by school when I first read it, or, as is perhaps more plausible, I simply ran out of Detective Novel steam and needed a change. Some eight years later, then, it is most certainly a pleasure to reacquaint myself with Harriet Rutland and her set of three almost pitch perfect novels, originally published over a four year period between 1939 and 1942.

As Curtis Evans points out in his typically well-researched and engagingly written introductions, Harriet Rutland was the pen name of one Olive Shimwell, who, with ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’ seemed to appear somewhat out of the blue as a fully-formed, bona-fide Top Quality new author in the detective fiction genre. The book is certainly great fun, laced with witty and intelligent references to literature assumed to be well above the genre’s scope, whilst managing to contain an entertaining puzzle within pages that glisten with the sheen of assured writing. It is a book that positively bristles with quotable outbursts from various characters, all of whom are sketched out in deft strokes, their foibles gently massaged into delicious caricature. It is also marvellously meta in so much as it features a would-be author of imaginary crime fiction within the book itself. This particular character is at one point asked if she writes for a hobby. “Oh no”, she replies. “I don’t like writing sufficiently well for that; it’s very hard work.”

The gift that Rutland/Shimwell has of course is to make it seem effortless. All three of her novels trot along at a perfect pace, which is to say just exuberantly enough to keep one turning the pages, yet with enough consideration to allow pauses for breath, reflection, and to take in the views. Speaking of which, there are some pleasant fictional views of Devon in ‘Knock…’ as the story is set in a fictionalised Paignton, with an additional nod to a faintly cloaked Newton Abbott, where Shimwell lived out her life, dying in 1962. This setting, though, with the Presteignton Hydro Hotel being likely modelled partly on what is now Paignton’s Esplanade Hotel, is apparently in itself transplanted from Shimwell’s experiences in Cork, Ireland. The obfuscation (along with Shimwell’s use of the Harriet Rutland nom de plume) is as well, because the characters who inhabit the pages of the book are hardly sensitively sketched. If they were, indeed, based even loosely on individuals encountered in the real Hydro hotel, then I dare say I would do my utmost to raise a smokescreen too.

It is, then, the darkly humorous manner in which Rutland depicts her characters and their relationships that is at the heart of what makes her books so entertaining. Catty exchanges and The Ultimate Vengeance abound in ‘Knock…’ with some withering glances cast at class distinction and social (im)mobility along the way. There is too, in all three of Rutland’s novels, a particular distaste shown towards the relationships between men and women. Reflective, perhaps, of Shimwell’s own experiences at the time (she divorced her first husband shortly after the publication of ‘Blue Murder’), there is something darkly pleasurable in the misogynistic attitudes displayed by some her male characters, most notably in ‘Knock…’ by the typically hapless local Police Inspector Palk who possesses “the greatest contempt for women writers” and whose estimation of the fictional writer of detective fiction goes up when “he realized that her books were still unprinted”.

The ‘star’ of the first two books is the rather elusive Mr Winkley of Scotland Yard. I say ‘elusive’ because he is not a Yard Inspector, but rather a back-room boffin recruited from the Intelligence Services after WW1 and, in normal circumstances, apparently tucked away in a room surrounded by years’ worth of evidence scraps that eventually, with a trick of his puzzle solving brain, he might connect in some way that shines light on previously unsolved crimes. His appearance in Rutland’s books is not even ‘official’ Yard business, but rather Winkley having something of a Busman’s Holiday. It’s a neat touch, for it allows the character to straddle the realms of amateur and professional; a foot in both camps of the genre, as it were. He’s a strange character compared to the others in Rutland’s books too in the sense that he often seems barely there. He sort of drifts wraith like through the first two novels, listening, looking and sifting, yet one almost gets the sense that he is never ‘investigating’. This, presumably, is a nod to his grounding in the Intelligence services, and it feels like a neat play by Rutland, anticipating in some ways the Cold War character of spooks that will come in the future. Certainly there is no notion that Winkley might possibly have come out of a Buchan novel, and certainly too there is nothing of the Holmes about him. This, I suggest, is A Very Good Thing.

Rutland’s second novel ‘Bleeding Hooks’ followed closely on the heels of her first and whilst it is again thoroughly enjoyable, it does perhaps suffer a little from being just a little hasty, with one or two characters feeling more lazily drawn than in ‘Knock…’ This is particularly true of two more, ah, youthful characters who are rather unfortunately named Pussy and Piggy. There is a notion that these two characters are intended as a lighthearted critique of Christie’s popular Tommy and Tuppence, and with much of Rutland’s work being quite transparently ‘about’ the whole nature of how detective fiction works (or doesn’t) then it’s easy to give this suggestion traction. What feels more interesting to me, though, is the way in which Rutland captures something of the timeless tensions that inevitably exist between generations. In one priceless moment she knowingly structures an exchange wherein a more elderly character exclaims to Pussy that “You Bright Young Things can’t keep your noses out of affairs which don’t concern you. It’s the result of all those wild Treasure Hunts, I suppose.” It is marvellously funny to see such a wildly out of date reference being made in 1940, and it is met with understandable distaste: “Pussy violently disliked the appellation. To her, Bright Young Things were antiquated. Most of those whom she knew had already become “hags”, and by this time had acquired several babies or divorces, or both.” I admit that I do enjoy this kind of obviously exaggerated generation gap, and whilst there is much to be frustrated about in the characters of Pussy and Piggy, there is a certain amount of warmth in how they are portrayed that is less visible in her more elderly characters. The humour has an almost Margery Sharp quality to it, and Rutland permits her nice Mr Winkley to reflect: “He wondered what kind of men and women they would become, and tried, ineffectually, to remember whether he had been quite so gauche, and yet so sophisticated, in his twenties.” In other words, even, or especially if we cannot remember, the chance are that we WERE all so gauche and yet so sophisticated in our twenties. It is the charm and the curse of the age. And we ought all to be so pleased to get beyond it.

As a ‘fishing’ detective novel, ‘Bleeding Hooks’ fits neatly within a sub-genre that also features such luminaries as Ngaio Marsh, Cyril Hare and the aforementioned Radford’s, whose ‘Murder Jigsaw’ was also resurrected by the Dean Street Press. One of the elements of such ‘activity-specific’ tales is the need for technical extrapolations (remember Sayers, ahem, clanging on interminably about bells in ‘The Nine Tailors’?) and Rutland rather unfortunately rises to the challenge here. Unless one is a fly-fishing aficionado, perhaps, in which case there is likely nowhere near enough technical detouring, and what there is tainted by the dilettante’s – or the fiction writer’s – inaccuracy. It’s hardly a deal breaker, however, for elsewhere in the book there are lovely undercurrents with subtle observations on notions of privacy, secrecy and the difficulty in making meaningful connections with other humans.

The possible Tommy and Tuppence reference aside, there is also more post-modern meta-fiction at play in ‘Bleeding Hooks’ to tickle our trouts, as it were. Little asides are peppered through the novel: “if this were a thriller, he’d definitely turn out to be the murderer”; “detective novels are not real reading, they’re recreation”; ““It sounds to me like one of those yarns you fishing fellows tell,” he said, “or else a plot by a lady novelist.””; ““Everybody knows that people commit suicide with prussic acid…” “In books,” put in Paget. “The lay public knows so little about it, that it’s a positive godsend to the writer of detective fiction.”. This last, incidentally, might notionally be considered A Spoiler, but frankly the whole story is so delectably mixed up in terms of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ (or ‘fiction’ and ‘meta fiction’) that it hardly matters. ‘Bleeding Hooks’ then might be the weakest of the three Rutland books, but only by the width of a gnat’s wing.

Now it is certainly the case that if The War (or the state of England in the shadow of it’s inevitable approach) is strangely all but invisible in Rutland’s first two books, it is certainly a feature in ‘Blue Murder’. It may be the best of the three, and opens spectacularly with what must be one of the most sharply withering lines about The Male Gaze: “Mr. Hardstaffe had reached the critical time of life when elderly gentlemen gaze at the legs of schoolgirls in railway carriages.”

This rather sets the tone for what is perhaps Rutland’s most direct assault on masculinity and the patriarchal society. Throughout the book there are barbs about the role of women, and the nature of women, very often put in the mouths of women characters themselves. The appalling Mrs Hardstaffe (it’s no spoiler to say that She Gets Her Comeuppance) spews out such gems as: “Girls are quite above themselves nowadays, with all these uniforms and high wages. I shudder to think what they’ll be like after this war.” And should one be in any doubt as to her personal leanings (in current times one rather imagines her as Suella Braverman) she comes out with this about, inevitably, Hitler: “I must say this is the first time I’ve felt any sympathy for ‘That Man’,” remarked Mrs. Hardstaffe, “but if all Jews are like her, I don’t wonder he cleared them out of the country, do you?”

The ‘her’ in question is Jewish refugee Freda Braun who has found employment as the Hardstaffe’s maid, and Rutland uses all of her characters to very effectively express a distaste for the anti-semitism and rampant nationalism that led Europe into the darkness of war. Rutland sides naturally with the oppressed and the worker, but also with the Younger Generations in whom, here, she seems to find some kind of Hope, even if it is tempered with a degree of bleak existential darkness.

Whilst there is, then, an understandable element of bleakness to the story, Rutland sets this off with her trademark black humour and clever critiquing of the genre in which she is working. There is a sense, indeed, of Rutland rather pulling out all the stops in this one, as she pushes the ‘fiction within a fiction’ play for all it’s worth. Mr Winkley is absent (perhaps recalled to the Intelligence Services to Serve His Country) and is replaced by struggling author Arthur Smith as the amateur sleuth looking for materials for a detective story that will bring more success than the dwindling returns from his Romances. Thus we see Rutland addressing the ‘psychological’ approach to investigation alongside the red herring of the individual confession, with typically amplified delight. It all makes for a thoroughly enjoyable and well written piece of period detective fiction, and one that anyone interested in fiction both written and set during WW2 ought to find space for on their shelves.

As previously mentioned, Curtis Evans’ introductions are informative and engaging, yet he offers no explanation as to why there were no more Harriet Rutland stories published after ‘Blue Murder’. Perhaps there was simply the realisation that she had pushed her meta-fictional critique of the genre as far as she cared to take it; that to do more would be to inevitably, eventually, dilute the entire process and end up being insufferably smug and repetitive. Perhaps too the ‘need’ to write (both from a financial and creative perspective) no longer lingered. It is, after all, “very hard work.” Or then again perhaps it was simply that her second marriage (in 1948) proved rather more pleasant than her first, and that perhaps as a result she found it rather more difficult to write with the pointedly, wickedly amusing scorn that makes ‘Knock, Murderer, Knock’, ‘Bleeding Hooks’ and ‘Blue Murder’ so marvellously appealing. Whatever the reason, it is has left us with a marvellously unspoilt snapshot of Harriet Rutland as an author and three tremendous pieces of detective fiction that belong in the very top tier.

From Lunesdale to Budleigh-Salterton.

Regular readers of the Unpopular Guide To Crime and Detective Fiction, if there be such a thing, will know that I have a particular penchant for books where an effective sense of place is evoked. A decent setting, preferably in a landscape where the real is either barely fictionalised or easily recognisable is almost guaranteed to have me hooked and spending my time between reading bouts poring over old OS Maps. George Bellairs is a master of this, particularly with his books set on the Isle of Man, as is E.C.R. Lorac, whose books set in Lunesdale are one of the greatest pleasures in her impressive catalogue. I have written about this before, of course, but the recent publication of her ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ in the British Library Crime Classics series makes a re-statement of Lorac’s tremendous appeal worthwhile.

First published in 1946, ‘Theft Of The Iron Dogs’ (it’s title in the U.S.A. was ‘Murderer’s Mistake’) is another one of those terrific post-WW2 novels that captures a sense of the age and gives an astute nod to the immense social shifts that are inevitably occurring in the English landscape, both physical and metaphorical. The theft of clothing coupons acts as one such contextual marker in the book but is significant only in so much as to mark out a character as one of those Spiv type chancers whose actions are bound to be dubious and whose sticky end we find difficult to mourn. That said, there are numerous references to the importance and value of fabrics throughout the book, which feels faintly quaint to anyone rooted in the disposable culture of our own times, but which effectively captures something of the austerity of the times. There is too something of the way in which old, well-worn, tatty overcoats and raincoats are seen as a symbol of pride amongst the gentry (I’m reminded of this again in a wonderful Harriet Rutland novel that I’m currently reading), and indeed it’s the ratty, smelly (“all good tweed smells!”) overcoat used in a reconstruction that helps nail the murderer.

In terms of the murder, it is a little difficult to say too much about this aspect of the book without giving away spoilers, but suffice to say that Lorac seems to use the book to tentatively explore those notions of the changing positions of class in the structure of the English landscape so vitally prevalent in the post-war period. There may still be a degree of mistrust in the itinerant working-classes, but Lorac does a decent job of attempting to play a fair hand. It’s notable of course that in her Scotland Yard character of Inspector MacDonald she allows the body of the Police force to be seen as decent and entirely reasonable, something that would, I’m sure, feel sadly alien to many in our 21st Century times. Whether the portrayal is any more accurate of the state of policing in 1946 is, of course, entirely up for debate.

The book really though is about that division between rural and urban that seems to have coloured much of the immediate post-war period. Lorac makes the point early, noting that “In the [rural] north-west of England the war effort had not been concerned with the nervous energy required by resistance to bombs or doodles or rockets: it had been the strain of sustained physical effort.” Later, she has characters discussing this divide, with one asking “Why the devil do we equate civilisation with cities?” before noting that the open fire before which they sit is “worth more than the proximity of cinemas and shops.” Finally, at the book’s conclusion, Lorac has her Inspector MacDonald reflect that “The life of the land was incomparably more important than the deaths of two men who had never realised that man still lives by the land and that its tilling is more fundamental to human needs than the accumulation of money.” No doubting where Lorac’s sympathies lie in that urban/rural debate, then…

Headon Hill’s ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ was written nearly a quarter of a century before Lorac’s and it shows. Many novels inhabiting the crime/detective genre from this period seem to me to be caught in a place where the author cannot quite decide if their book is a mystery or a thriller/adventure and end up with a foot in both camps, with neither convincingly planted. ‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ is certainly such a book, but has more than enough charm to make up for this fact, particularly for anyone familiar with the Devon coastline around Budleigh Salterton, which here becomes Bicton-On-Sea.

The ‘mystery’ alluded to in the title refers to the death of a ne’er do well character tramping the coastal path who rather fortuitously stumbles on a letter in an overcoat pocket (those damned tatty overcoats of the gentry again). Said letter remarkably alludes to a wife deserted by the tramp some seven years previously who now, even more remarkably, appears to be living in Budleigh and planning to marry a retired Colonel. Such scarcely believable coincidences (which are unfurled in the first few pages of the book, incidentally, so I’m hardly giving the game away here) do rather set the tone for the book, which romps along in much the same way for it’s entirety. Naturally there is a Scotland Yard element (both retired and serving), alongside mystery romance novelist Claude Raven (which if one were to be enormously generous one might suggest lends the novel a gossamer thread of postmodernism) and his daughter who lends a romance element of sorts. Throw in an illicit distillery, a melodramatically evil financier (“with the coal-black hair and the Hebraic nose”, naturally) and a gaudy stage celebrity whose star has waned, plus sundry stereotypical Toughs and Wrong’Uns and you have a concoction that fairly bubbles with entertaining action. It’s hardly top-drawer stuff, and if the final third of the book dissolves rather into run-of-the-mill adventure yarn, that’s fair enough. Still, it is more than worth the 79p admission price for a Kindle edition. One might be excused for asking for a new cover, however, as the design of the Black Heath Classic Crime series books really are universally appalling. Many is the time I have shuddered and passed on their titles when they are ‘recommended’ by the algorithm, and I would certainly have done the same with this one if not for the local setting. As such, the cover shown here is my own replacement, dashed off in a few idle moments. If I ever pick more of the Black Heath reissues (and after this one, I admit, I could be tempted) I can see the template being re-used (publishers please note that I’m for hire)…

‘The Cliff-Path Mystery’ does capture its setting remarkably well, however, and it is obvious that Headon Hill must have been intimately familiar with Budleigh Salterton and its environs. The old Rolle Hotel for example becomes Royal Hotel (see what Hill did there?!), whilst the importantly positioned ‘Peak House’ is most likely the red-brick late Victorian villa that sits above the site of the former Rosemullion Hotel, its garden gate vitally giving direct access to the cliff-path. I admit that I am uncertain if the Rosemullion would have been built at the time Hill wrote his novel, but nevertheless the inclusion of Claude Raven as “a household word on four continents as a writer of sensational fiction with a punch in every chapter” seems a rather nice nod to the fact that Sir Henry Rider Haggard enjoyed spending some of his last days at the hotel. Entirely possible too that this is merely my projecting knowledge onto the fiction, but that is half the fun of such things, isn’t it? Meanwhile, the retired Scotland Yard detective sergeant and his wife keep a lodging house on the Parade, which these days is commonly referred to as ‘Millionaires Row’. So a shrewd investment for their future family I should have thought. Elsewhere, the golf course (where Noel Coward’s Elvira Condomine would spend “seven hours of every day”) is of course in play, as are the cottages and villas of Victoria Place and the imposing holloway of Dark Lane. Also, as is not uncommon in such books, there is a mixing of real and not-quite-real place names. Exeter, Sidmouth, Ladram Bay, Brixham (with specific reference to the brown sailed trawlers at work in Lyme Bay) and the distant Berry Head are all named, but Newton Poppleford rather bizarrely becomes Newberry Poppleton.

Of course one of the downsides of having local knowledge is in seeing peculiarities amongst accuracies. As such, anyone with a working knowledge of the area (and now, by default, anyone reading this) cannot help but wonder why anyone going from Budleigh (okay, okay, Bicton-On-Sea) to ‘Mucklepath Farm’ (which is supposed to be very close to Ladram Bay – so perhaps the real ‘Sea View Farm’) would go all the way up to Newton Poppleford and then back down the lanes. Why would they not just cross the river by the Otterton bridge and cut several miles off the journey? It is possible that Hill was overthinking things (as indeed I have just done a century later) in order to extend the time needed to get there from here (or vice versa). Such are the vagaries of landscape, fact and fiction.

What Comes Next?

It must now be about a year since I read Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ and started to notice just how much I was enjoying fiction (both detective/crime and ‘non genre’) from the years immediately after WW2. How the cataclysm of that event altered the nature of many writers’ output and how the understandable preoccupation with What Comes Next manifested itself. It’s something of a disappointment then to see that there is, on the surface, little of this in Clifford Witting’s 1947 ‘Let X Be The Murderer’, in which Inspector Charlton makes another appearance, this time solving one of those kinds of ‘impossible crimes’ so beloved of the inter-war years detective puzzler. In some ways this rather positions ‘Let X…’ as one of the weaker of the Charlton/Witting books that have so far been reissued by Galileo Books, although it must also be pointed out that this is no great criticism, for Witting is surely amongst the very best writers of detective fiction in any period. Yet ‘Let X…’ feels as if Witting may have been pressured by a publisher who was rather keen to have a more, ah, ‘traditional’ yarn in their catalogue. One can picture the publisher having Witting over for lunch (a meagre affair, in the post-war years, one imagines) and saying “now then, Clifford old boy, let’s have Inspector Charlton make an appearance right at the start shall we? No point leaving him lurking in the background until we’re two thirds of the way through the book, now, is there? And what about a bit of that ‘Impossible Crime’ stuff? And a Country House… Y’see dear boy (and at this point I imagine the publisher will polish his prince-nez) it’s important that we re-establish some Rules, don’t you know. Hmmm?” To which one imagines Witting inwardly groaning and, thinking of the trials and tribulations of Austerity, grinning and bearing it. Perhaps I am being altogether too harsh on the imaginary publisher and too lenient on Witting. Perhaps Witting himself thought that Tradition ought to be invoked… “Structure! That’s what we need Witting. STRUCTURE dammit!”

And structure you shall have. For ‘Let X…’ is broken neatly into four sections that distill the investigative process: Theorem; Hypothesis; Construction; Proof. In another’s hands this approach would risk being unutterably dull, but Witting is never that, and so ‘Let X…’ rises above many procedural plodders with allusions to ghosts and with undercurrents driven by jealousy, vengeance, greed and, uh, Class Warfare. It is, of course, with these threads of Class, Position and Wealth that Witting positions ‘Let X…’ within the traditional inter-war forms whilst acknowledging the uncertainties of The Future. He carries this off admirably because he is such a fine writer, but one cannot help but feel that a marginally more experimental approach might have yielded greater dividends. “Less structure!” as the heckler once shouted at Huggy Bear. But only a little less, if you would be so kind…

There is a strong possibility that my slight disappointment with ‘Let X Be The Murderer’ has been coloured simply by the fact that I find myself, if not wearying of the detective/crime genre, but at least finding other seams of literature to be currently more enjoyable. Most significantly these would be the ones mined by the Middlebrow women writers of the inter and immediate post-WW2 years. I do use that categorisation in the broadest and most positive of manners of course, and largely as a result of so many wonderful books having been salvaged in the past decade or more by the ‘Furrowed Middlebrow’ imprint. It is tragic to think that, following the death earlier this year of publisher Rupert Heath, we may not see further titles unearthed, but in reality the catalogue is so extensive that there is enough to keep one happy for a long time to come. There are numerous D.E. Stevenson’s, Susan Scarlett’s and Elizabeth Eliot’s still to explore for me, whilst in recent weeks I turned my attention once again to Stella Gibbons, whose ‘The Weather at Tregulla’ I read whilst on a four day trip down to The Lizard.

Previously I have written a little harshly about Gibbon’s ‘classic’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ and drawn criticism for doing so. Fair enough. Yet I still stand by my belief that the book is too long and that the jokes wear thin rather quickly. I blame Gibbon’s youth when writing it, myself. There are few things more tiresome than the wit of a an intelligent young person poking fun at things the older generations venerate, except when one is young oneself. Then, it is the ‘wit’ of these older generations nodding sagely and saying ‘you’ll see…’ that is tiresome beyond words. Naturally I plead guilty as charged to that particular crime.

Whatever. I stand by my position of having enjoyed ‘Westwood’ and ‘Here Be Dragons’ considerably more than ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, whilst ‘The Weather at Tregulla’ may well be my favourite Gibbons so far. Perhaps reading it whilst being generally in and around the locale where the book is set helped, but Gibbons does a tremendous job of conjuring the Cornish land and seascapes regardless. Published and set in the early 1960s, the book already laments a Cornwall being disfigured by the scourge of Tourism and Outsiders who rather tiresomely both celebrate and diminish it by their actions. It’s a book that perceptively recognises the inevitable pull/push of place and people on The Young, whilst also making rather scathing digs at Class (an English infatuation, and understandably so, one has to admit) and perceptions of the, ah, Artistic Temperament. It is also a Love Story, a Romance of fine quality in which expectations are adhered to and standards upheld, at least up until the point where they aren’t… For, as with E.M. Delafield, the ending of ‘Tregulla’ is a difficult blending of tragedy and happiness, where the nature of both is called into question. I rather like to think that there is something here of Gibbons casting a beady eye over her younger self and saying something about how Things Aren’t That Simple. Even when they are.

Now I am not sure if Mollie Panter-Downes would fall into the category of ‘Middlebrow’, but I do know that I have devoured three of her books in rapid succession. Her 1946 novel ‘One Fine Day’ ranks up with Margaret Kennedy’s ‘The Feast’ in being one of the best post-WW2 novels I have read. It is a deceptively soft novel, one where the hardships of daily existence rub up against glorious observations of nature. In the first chapter there is a delicious depiction of Barrow Down above the village of Wealding, where in spring “dog-violets filled small blue lakes in the bleached grass, followed later by the pink and white restharrow, clean as sprigged chintz, and the great golden candlesticks of mulleins.” I myself am notoriously ignorant of the names of plants (C needs to remind me of what everything is called each time we walk along the hedgerows or I pick through the terrific over-filled magic of our/her garden) but I do so enjoy seeing them conjured on the pages of books. Also, there is a magnificent mullein in the raised bed outside my studio window, so that one at least I know (until I forget)…

Barrow Down, then, is immediately positioned by Panter-Downes as emblematic of timelessness: “Up here, on the empty hilltop, something said I am England. I will remain.” It’s an important point that she is making too, for it marks landscape as the thing that both holds and projects a sense of identity. Certainly it is a landscape with ancient human intervention, but this is a relationship softened by time to being obfuscated and mythical. The hill, then, dominates the landscape as it does the book in a vivid yet gentle way. The story may revolve around the difficulties endured by people in the aftermath of war, specifically the comforts of the middle-classes that seem to have been eroded from both ends, but the magical energies of the hillside suggest that all such notions of class and position evaporate in their presence. And I say it is a’ deceptively soft’ novel because whilst it feels rather quietly optimistic in its outlook, the eighty years or so since its initial creation rather lend it a depressing air. One cannot help but read it now and despair rather at How We Ended Up Where/How We Are. In England. In the world. One wonders why/how Human’s didn’t learn. But then they/we never do/did. I blame the teachers.

There is too a vivid sense of this in Panter-Downe’s ‘London War Notes’, which is a collection of her ‘letters from London’ originally published as a regular column in ‘The New Yorker’. Whilst such pieces retrospectively suffer somewhat from that fact that We Know How It Ends, ‘London War Notes’ nevertheless hold one’s attention in riveting style. What is perhaps surprising to a 21st Century eye is the degree in which there is criticism of certain strands of British government throughout the span of the war. This criticism, given the target audience, rarely if ever falls on Churchill himself, but it does often extend to the various other positions and characters, both political and military. One rarely hears of such disgruntlement in Official Histories of the home front during WW2 (particularly so in the polarised post-Brexit context) so seeing it so openly stated takes one’s breath away a little. Similarly, whilst there is clearly a need for the pieces to uphold the air of ‘London Can Take It’, there are also nods to the fact that whilst this might be true, it’s also a jolly hard life, even whilst daily life goes on. Indeed, it’s the regular references to things like the theatre and sporting events that draw one up a little rapidly. Somehow the notion of a ‘cultural’ life going in in wartime feels rather alien; the idea of cricket matches against the Australians still taking place at Lords in 1943 something of an affront. One can imagine the indignant cries of the retired Colonels: “Why are these young men not in the Forces?! Why are they bowling cricket balls when they could be hurling hand grenades?!” And then immediately forgetting themselves by adding “oh, fine stroke… fine stroke… well played, Sir. Well played indeed.”

Much of what she put into her ‘London War Notes’ surfaces in the largely previously un-published short stories collected in ‘Good Evening Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes’. Bookended by two ‘Letter from London’ pieces, these short slices of fiction are terrific reading, even for someone who usually struggles with the short story form. Whilst filled with the author’s perceptive journalistic eye for detail, the stories add an appealing veneer of playfulness and imagination that lift them, in my opinion, above the ‘War Notes’ in terms of ultimate reading pleasure. Apparently Panter-Downes herself was rather dismissive of her fiction, disowning all of her novels except ‘One Fine Day’, and preferring instead to see herself as a journalist. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but there is more than enough evidence in these short stories and in ‘One Fine Day’ to suggest that she may have significantly undersold herself as a brilliant purveyor of fiction.

And then, finally, if we are to consider WW2 and imaginative fiction, there is Barbara Euphan Todd’s wonderful ‘Miss Ranskill Comes Home’. Published, like ‘One Fine Day’, in 1946, ‘Miss Ranskill’ takes as its premise the idea of a woman returned to England in 1943 after four years stranded on a desert island with only a working class Carpenter who dies before Miss Ranskill can take to the ocean on the boat he has crafted. This isn’t a spoiler, incidentally, as you will see when you read the opening pages of the book… On one level of course all this desert island stuff is a preposterous notion, and there are points indeed during her, ah, ‘reintegration’ where Miss Ranskill/Euphan Todd acknowledges this in a kind of meta-fictional nod to the audience, but it is SUCH a preposterous idea that it works tremendously well. Miss Ranskill’s struggles to re-establish herself within the turmoil of the war-torn Homefront allow us to reflect on the absurdities of life under duress that populations allow, indeed encourage themselves to accept, perpetuate and ultimately celebrate. Euphan Todd indeed seems to take great delight in showing up the hypocrisy of some of those involved in keeping the home fires burning, and in doing so delivers a withering critique of class structure that is only lightly clothed in the tattered outfit of humour and absurdity. As in ‘One Fine Day’ there is something too of the missed simplicity of nature in ‘Miss Ranskill’ that appeals enormously. Perhaps this is not entirely unexpected in the work of someone more famous for the creation of the Worzel Gummidge character and stories, but that’s for someone much more familiar with those books to say. All I know is that ‘Miss Ranskill Comes Home’ is one of the most unusual and marvellously engaging pieces of WW2 fiction I have come across.

Now, what comes next?

More Moray

The tragic death of publisher Rupert Heath at the start of this year was hard to take on a personal level, for whilst we had only fairly recently begun to exchange emails and messages he already felt like someone I might have known for most of my life. From an objective perspective too his death has been an immense loss, for his Dean Street Press imprint was such a steadfastly reliable source of great books by often un-heralded and ‘lost’ writers of the Golden Age and beyond. There may have been some I warmed to more than others, but that is to be expected when considering such great ‘labels’. I mean, show me the person who loves every band who released a record on Factory and I’ll show you someone who may be bending the truth somewhat.

I’m happy, however, that the five Moray Dalton reissues planned before Rupert’s passing have seen the light of day, for they are terrific books and firmly in the spirit of what Dean Street Press was all about. Whilst the British Library Classic Crime series may focus on one or two titles by an author being squeezed out at a rate of one per month, DSP’s strength was always in striving to make available a body of work by any given author in a batch decent enough to get one’s teeth into. There are few things in life more rewarding than stumbling on a series of books, after all, and I will be forever grateful to Rupert Heath for giving me plenty of opportunities to indulge that pleasure. Ianthe Jerrold, Robin Forsyth, E.R. Punshon, Molly Thynne, Christopher Bush, Basil Thomson, Elizabeth Gill, the Radfords and the brilliant Francis Vivian. Even Brian Flynn, if you must. Plus, of course, Moray Dalton.

I wrote about the first batch of Dalton books released by DSP back in 2020, when they provided excellent entertainment in the early months of The Virus. I wrote at the time that her serial detective Hugh Collier was something of a wraith in the books and that whilst there seemed to be little character development this was not necessarily a bad thing. Whilst this is still true in most of the Collier series books I’ve read, in ‘The Mystery Of The Kneeling Woman’ there is a degree more colour added to the background of the Scotland Yard detective as he attempts to disentangle a mystery involving the death of a village recluse, poisoned chocolates, church brasses, bitter reflections on The Great War, obsessive revenge fantasies, small children, ‘memory loss’ and characters determinedly Taking The Blame. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that this is the book in which Collier’s love life is laid out for us and his future state of marriage explained, and Dalton confidently paints Collier as a Thoroughly Decent Chap. Perhaps one of the reasons I warm to Collier is that, besides being a fellow Scot, he reminds me of Francis Vivian’s tremendous Inspector Knollis in that he eschews all the fluff and flummery of the amateur sleuth and replaces it with quiet hard graft. Knollis famously disregards notions of coincidence and Collier is certainly hewn from the same stone, pointing out that “What some people call the science of detection is simply the accumulation of apparently irrelevant and unimportant facts.” One can imagine Knollis nodding sagely in agreement.

There is much, then, in ‘The Mystery of The Kneeling Woman’ that appeals, and there are some tremendous little digs thrown into the mix by Dalton through her various characters. The City versus Country trope is well served by the Yard detective sergeant Duffield who, amongst other things, betrays “some ignorance of life in the country” by suggesting that “one day must be very like another in these villages”. Elsewhere he suggests that the furnishings of a Country House now owned by a business magnate “smells of the Tottenham Court Road”, a line which I admit made me snort into my sherry. Indeed, Dalton enjoys playing on the trope of New Money playing at being Gentry, having one of her village characters sniffly say about the aforementioned business magnate that “he’s not one of the old landed gentry” but rather “a retired manufacturer [who] made his pile during the War.” As the book progresses there is certainly a sense that Money might be able to buy one property and titles, but it does not, as Collier later wryly observes “bring happiness.” He does, naturally, unravel all the bizarrely entwined threads of the case and gives us all a satisfyingly brief explanation at the book’s conclusion. None of your tedious extended expostulations of clever deductions for Dalton, thank goodness.

In many ways ‘The Mystery of The Kneeling Woman’ then is a romantic tragedy masquerading as a detective story (or vice versa) and is none the worse for that. The following year’s ‘Death In The Dark’ is every bit as fine and every bit as deliciously bonkers as Dalton gleefully throws circus performers, drugs, disreputable doctors and a private zoo into the mix. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!… There is a nice thread of continuity between ‘Kneeling Woman’ and this one in that it is the same small child from the previous book who pulls Collier into the mystery of this one. The major protagonist, however, is the sister (Judy) of a circus acrobat deviously framed for murder. She inveigles her way into the lion’s den (almost literally – the Big Cat in question is actually a Tiger) in a bid to Learn The Awful Truth, uncover the devilish plot and save her brother from the hangman’s noose. As you can probably tell, it’s a marvellous thriller of a novel as Collier and Judy race to prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice. Bonus points for the South West of England setting, with Seaton and Sidmouth both getting a name check.

The third and last of the Inspector Collier books to be republished by DSP is 1939’s fantastic ‘Death In The Forest’. I say fantastic because it really is fantastical with a central trope of lycanthropy and a rather marvellous section that takes place during a revolution in the fictional South American country of San Rinaldo. Indeed, this part of the book reminds me of ‘Tintin and The Picaros’ with General Alcazar leading his revolution in San Theodoros. These days one could most likely not get away with such a cartoonish portrayal of what used be called ’Banana Republics’ and in some respects it is perhaps surprising that Herge did so in 1974. In 1939 however there were certainly no qualms about portraying these South American countries as a ‘backward’ realm where superstition was ancient and deeply rooted whilst notions of government merely fleeting and transitory and dependent on who had most money/power at any given moment. Which rather sounds like a description of contemporary global politics, but there we are…

‘Death In The Forest’ then continues Dalton’s preference for throwing multiple ingredients into the mix and blending them into a peculiarly delicious concoction. So as well as the suggestions of werewolves we have more poisonings, star-crossed lovers, family betrayals, domineering mothers and self-obsessed sons hellbent on a life of frippery and foppery, plus the kitchen sink besides. There is an also a delightful piece of self-reference when Collier is confronted by the notion of lycanthropy. “I’ve come across some strange things myself” Collier points out. “I was in charge of the Belgrave Manor case, you know. You mayn’t have heard of that. A witch’s coven on the Sussex Downs.” Indeed, as in that ‘Belgrave Manor Crime’, Dalton seems to take enormous pleasure in writing a marvellously entertaining piece of fantasy fiction where the basic form of the detective novel serves merely as a foundation for her active (over)imagination. I suspect that such wild flights of fancy might put off fans of the more, ah, ‘considered’ practitioners of detective fiction, but even they must surely appreciate the genius of Dalton’s deployment of the grounded and reliable Collier as foil to the fantastical. Indeed, it’s this marvellous drama of contrasts that make Moray Dalton and Inspector Collier amongst my favourite combinations.

I admit then that the lack of Inspector Collier in the final two Dalton novels to be published by DSP filled me with a little apprehension, as did the shifting of setting from the familiar South of England to Italy. I need not have worried though, for Dalton’s sense of place is, if anything, even more at play in her 1945 novel ‘The Death of Eve’ and the following year’s ‘Death At The Villa’. In contrast to her tremendously fantastical mysteries of the interwar years, these two stand-alone yet connected novels are altogether more serious and sombre affairs and admirably display the fact that Dalton is, for all the wild and unbelievable excitement of her earlier books, quite simply a Good Writer.

The two books may be standalone novels set some forty or more years apart, yet they are certainly connected by the notion that history is a thread where events pulse through eras and inform the future. ‘The Murder of Eve’ and ‘Death at the Villa’ may be set in two different Italy’s, but it is clear that Dolton is saying something about how Money and Power corrupt absolutely and that whilst Political Ideology may be used as a cloak, it is essentially the same patriarchal power structure that prevails and that it is women who pay the greatest price. Indeed, the title of ‘The Murder of Eve’ kind of flags this up from the start, just in case you miss the point being made…

Both of these novels, then, feel much more Modern than any of the Inspector Collier books, and whilst Dalton still effortlessly employs her skills to provide well-paced narratives, there is little that is light about these books other than the writer’s deftness of touch. One of these light touches is another of those lovely self-referential comments, where amateur sleuth Roger Fordyce admits that “It was comparatively easy for the detective heroes of the thrillers he most enjoyed. They usually had the resources of New Scotland Yard at their disposal, or, if they happened to be amateurs, they had a faithful, though thick-headed, friend in attendance, or a valet who was also a boxing champion and an expert photographer.” Fordyce does eventually employ the assistance of a friend in the form of disgraced piano teacher Lily who, it must be added, is far from thick-headed. From this point however Dalton rather subverts the usual form for amateur sleuthing, and this is another sign perhaps of a bleaker darkness at work. Meanwhile, for fans of Postcard Records there is a mention of Louis Wain’s cats… The book is fired through with this kind of turn of the (19th to 20th) Century detail and if its central obsession with the idea of so-called White Slavery seems quaint, then re-phrasing it as sex trafficking perhaps makes it feel more, depressingly, relevant and up to date.

‘Death At The Villa’ meanwhile portrays a much more contemporaneous Italy as Dalton sets the story in the midst of WW2. In this Italy the crumbling aristocracy struggles to survive alongside the peasantry, neither being particularly safe against the pervasive evil of fascism. That being said, it is of course the exploited peasantry who suffer most and Dalton isn’t shy about making this observation. Her main protagonists though are Richard Drew – a Thoroughly Decent Englishman (of course) – and Alda, an Italian woman whose status straddles the vanishing world of aristocracy (to which she belongs through blood, if not position) and the harsh realities of living in a fascist state. The English RAF flyer Richard naturally plays the part of the plucky fighter and is straight out of a Richard Hannay novel, which makes me wonder if the character’s name is indeed a cheeky nod to Hannay. You may not be altogether surprised to learn that the book is in part a romantic thriller that builds around the relationship between him and Alda, and in this it works admirably. Yet it is also a bleaker treatise on the savagery endlessly perpetrated by the patriarchy and alongside ‘The Murder of Eve’ it stands as a highly entertaining but essentially sober piece of fiction.

Again, bonus points too for the mention of the South West of England in ’Death at the Villa’, this time the little Devon coastal town (then village, I suppose) of Beer, where Richard Drew recalls a holiday “when he was about eight years old, a holiday when the sun always shone and there were shrimps for tea, and the object of his hero worship, a good-natured fisherman, allowed him to sit by him on the beach and help to mend nets that smelt deliciously of tar.”

It is of course a source of profound sorrow that these Moray Dalton books may be the final bow from Dean Street Press. They are, however, a mighty fine high on which to lower the curtain.

Unpopular Book Advent 2022 – Day 7

‘Blue Suede Clues’ by Daniel Klein
Originally published 2002, reissued 2022 by Dean Street Press.
This review was originally published as part of a longer blog post here.

So what did you do on September 19th 2022? Like many in the UK I am no royalist, yet I have no problem with many who are and have no issue with anyone who chose to spend the day on the streets of London or in front of television sets. For royalist or not, this has surely been a significant punctuation point in the history of the UK, for better or for worse, and everyone has their reasons. Me, I spent much of the day at the beach, skimming on a paddle-board over the barely concealed rocks of Branscombe Ebb at high tide and swimming in the sea at Littlecombe Shoot. Overhead the blue skies gave way to the growing threat of glowering grey clouds building above Coxe’s cliff. If one were given to looking for symbolism and metaphor in nature then there was much to take pleasure in. And then, in the afternoon, I read about The King.

Naturally there is only one King. Elvis Presley. The King of Rock and Roll. Hot dog. But did you know that he was also the King of private investigators? It is perhaps hard to fathom, but in the early part of the 21st Century, American author Daniel Klein made this astonishing discovery whilst engaged in some academic research into Presley’s life and career in the early 1960s*. How this escaped Peter Guralnick’s forensic two part biography of Elvis is anyone’s guess, but there you are. Yet rather than challenge Guralnick’s surely peerless work, Klein decided to place these new revelations into works of fiction, meticulously placing clues and references to people, places, events and artefacts that one would find in the pages of ‘Last Train To Memphis’ with these new discoveries. Originally published in the early noughties, Klein’s four novels have been republished by the fine folks at Dean Street Press and are well worth seeking out.

The books in the short series all take their title from familiar Elvis numbers, hence ‘Kill Me Tender’, ‘Blue Suede Clues’, ‘Viva Las Vengeance’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Such Vicious Minds’. One might well cringe and suggest that the pun is the lowest form of wit, or bristle in anger at the mere thought of poking fun at anything related to The King, but there might be an argument there that one might have no sense of fun and what, after all, is Pop culture without a hefty dose of fun and frenzy? Both those elements are certainly gleefully threaded all the way through ‘Blue Suede Clues’, a book that I have, to my surprise, thoroughly enjoyed racing through in the past few days. To say that I was initially sceptical about the idea of Elvis as PI would be an understatement, yet the surreal qualities of the situation really are hugely entertaining. Relax into it and suddenly it feels like watching Nicholas Cage playing Philip Marlowe in a film scripted by Ross MacDonald and directed by The Marx Brothers. One rather wonders what Greil Marcus would make of it all.

Naturally there is a lot of Elvis mythology in ‘Blue Suede Clues’ and I suspect that the entire quartet of books provides a pretty fine whistle-stop tour of the crucial ingredients of The King’s story. In ‘Blue Suede Clues’ then we delve into themes of sexual repression and confusion (there’s a lot of reference to Freud, which MacDonald would have surely enjoyed playing with in that imaginary script I mentioned); the tension of Presley’s tug-of-love between Ann-Margret and Priscilla; the connectedness of twins and the attendant feelings of loss and betrayal (Jesse Garon gets a lot of mentions, though disappointingly there is no sneaky reference to any Desperadoes); the importance of junk food, and hamburgers in particular (White Tower gets some excellent product placement, although at the time of the book’s original 2002 publication the franchise was in near terminal decline, so I doubt they benefited much from any publicity); and the incipient dependence on prescription painkillers (Klein traces this to an incident involving a stunt harness whilst Presley was making ‘Kissin’ Cousins’, the filming of which provides the contextual roots for the entire book). If one were being overly critical it would be easy to suggest that many of these historical references feel forced, yet in truth they are no more so than other such details dropped hamfistedly into period fiction. Indeed, Klein seems to positively revel in weaving his surreal fictional Elvis amongst these ‘real’ situations and people. There is an implicit understanding that with Fame comes the surrendering of ownership of one’s personality. That, indeed, personality is by default splintered, with the self necessarily becoming multiple (hence the appropriateness of the whole ruptured twin symbolism in Presley’s life). Except not so clumsily pseudo-psychological. Instead, hammy winks are thrown. We are all in on the joke. Hot dog.

*this assertion may not be entirely accurate.